Top Colleges Doing the Most for Low-Income Students
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That bears repeating: a 4-year, 75% graduation rate was better than almost EVERY public school in the country. By that measure, the University of California doesn't even make the list.
Also Vassar shows an endowment per student of 32x the top public university. So 4 year 75% grad rate is great, but note that the achievement is in the context of a smaller proportion of pressured students and access to much higher resources.
There's some interesting info here on graduation rates at the UCs, broken down by pell and non-pell over 4, 5, and 6 years: http://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapte... Basically, there's a sizable but variable difference in 4-year graduation rate between pell and non-pell, but that all but vanishes in the 5- and 6-year rates.
To your second point, of course. Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford have over a million USD per student, no public school can compare to private on those ends.