If you want to attend a “name” college such as UCB, UCLA, UCSD, then you ned to choose your CC carefully - Cuesta, Foothills, DeAnza, MiraCosta, SMCC, SBCC … have excellent transfer rates. Not all CC’s do.
HOWEVER, you may well attend a good community college, do well, and NOT get into UCB or UCLA (they don’t have TAG so admission is very selective). So don’t think it’s either UCB/UCLA now, or CC now but necessarily UCB/UCLA later.
ALL UC’s are good, certainly stronger than many Western Flagship, at a decent cost. Don’t discard them because your parents have the strange notion only two of them are good. Cal Poly SLO and SDSU are also good universities. I’d pick Cal Poly SLO for STEM and Business over SDSU, but I’d personally not know whether I like UCSC or SDSU better. UCSB and UCD are both incredible, and anyone would be lucky to get ino UCSB’s College of Creative Studies (which is like grad school but for handpicked undergrads.)
Please run NPCs and return here with each college and its net price, indicating which ones your parents would consider “worth paying for”.
Are there colleges your parents would refuse to pay for?
It’s pointless to get into a college you can’t afford.
Are your parents okay wish USC, Scripps, Pitzer, Occidental, Chapman, LMU? What about colleges further up the coast - UWashington-Seattle if they have 50K (why they’d want to pay that much when UCSB and UCD are right there in CA for half the price … not sure… but…), Lewis&Clark, Reed, UPortland, USeattle, Whitman, Willamette, Gonzaga?
What about paying for more personal attention (and more precise letters of recommendation), smaller, interactive classes, less redtape at a private college that’s well-considered in the academic world (but, because it’s small and doesn’t have a football team, they may not have heard of)? I’m thinking colleges like Smith, Wellesley, Macalester, Kenyon?