Just make it free.

The professors all have masters or PhDs and have the same qualifications as teaching at universities.

This is very much not the case. I work really well with my cc colleagues, but there are significant differences in qualifications since CC's teach lower division courses only.

The colleagues I have in analogous cc departments nearby? They don't even have appropriate credentials in the right discipline. Some of them will have a computer science undergraduate degree and then a business master's. Some will have two business degrees in marginally related fields. Most don't have Ph.D.s at all, so that is largely irrelevant.

The way they keep up with the field? Remarkably different. We do research which advanced the state of our field. Ideally the boundaries we push allow us to craft new and important experiences for our students, not just the same things you could look up in a government catalog.

You wouldn't have noticed because the instructors you had at the CC were only teaching first and second year courses. The bar is actually pretty low there, even in many universities. As a grad student I taught introductory sections possessing only a bachelor's in the subject. The truth is many cc instructors may not even know the materials at the upper division you may see at a 4 year.

I appreciate your lived experiences, but they are in the end of the consumer, where everything is tidied up (as well as it can be) on the other side for you. The actual reality is far different.

BTW, big leftist dude here. I want the cost to go down and the real solution? Go back to pre-1980s funding models prior to Reagan being governor of CA. He defunded education on a large scale, shifting the burden of education costs from state taxes to the individual 18 year old with no actual money.

Things got worse after that, as defunding became more advanced and more prolific. We can't further devalue degrees, nor can we afford to further defund 4+ year degrees because competition will collapse.