Free? none that I know of. There was an interesting article in The New American this time around. I wish it was on the web site so I could repost it. Showed a graph of enrollment verse jobs. Enrollment was flat, jobs looked like a AGW graph. It was very telling.
(I knew that at one time, at least the juco's were free.)
The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education and the resulting Donahoe Act was a turning point in higher education in California. The UC and CSU systems were to limit their enrollments, yet an overall goal was to "provide an appropriate place in California public higher education for every student who is willing and able to benefit from attendance", meaning the junior colleges were to fulfill this role. By 1967 studies were showing that the California Department of Education was not doing an adequate job of leading the junior colleges, and legislation passed control from the Board of Education to a new community college system with a Chancellor's Office and Board of Governors. The degree of local control in this system, a side effect of the origins of many colleges within high school districts, can be seen in that 52 of the 72 districts (72%) govern only a single college; only a few districts in major metropolitan areas control more than four colleges.
The Master Plan for Higher Education also banned tuition, as it was based on the ideal that public higher education should be free to students (just like K-12 primary and secondary education). As officially enacted, it states that public higher education "shall be tuition free to all residents." Thus, California residents legally do not pay tuition. However, the state has suffered severe budget deficits ever since the enacting of Proposition 13 in 1978, which led to the imposition of per-unit enrollment fees for California residents (equivalent in all but name to tuition) at all community colleges and all CSU and UC campuses to get around the legal ban on tuition. Non-resident and international students, however, do pay tuition, which at community colleges is usually an additional $100 per unit (or credit) on top of the standard enrollment fee. Since no other American state bans tuition in public higher education, this issue is unique to California. In summer 2010, the state's public higher education systems began investigating the possibility of dropping the semantic confusion and switching to the more accurate term, tuition.[3]