[stutonk]

In my state, most of the programs the community colleges offer are aimed either at credential acquisition or for transfer to a university; there are no four year programs. However, many of the teachers at these schools are also PhDs moonlighting from local universities where they teach upper-level subjects and the community college offers a handful of classes that are at the 300/junior level for certain subjects. The thing that's really missing from the community college curriculum that would shake up the university pricing model is the ability to get a Bachelor's degree. At least in my state, it doesn't seem like there would be too much of a stretch to accommodate the additional educational resources it would require. Some people go to a university because they want access to first-class facilities, professors, student networking, and the like. In fact, the tuition at my local university more than doubled after they managed to get their basketball team into the NCAA Final Four one year. But many people don't care about this kind of thing; they just need their 'certificate of passage of this particular social ritual'.

[thaumasiotes]

Comparing tuition at Cabrillo College (community college for Santa Cruz, CA) and SJSU (California State University in San Jose), it looks like a "normal" course costs $574 at the bottom-tier 4-year university vs $230 at the community college. If you take 2 or fewer classes in a semester at SJSU (as a full-time student, you're supposed to take 5), tuition falls nearly in half to $333 per class.

$6000 tuition per year is high enough to be prohibitive for some people. But those people are the focus of intensive recruitment and financial aid efforts by universities all up and down the hierarchy of status. That isn't the first place I'd look if I were seeking to answer "why aren't more poor people going to college?"