My D is an international student and she was accepted by seven US universities. By now, she is in doubt between UCSB, UW-Seattle and UMass-Amherst. Her major is Physics. She has too many questions, and I will try to resume:
How is the Physics major in these universities, what is the best? (we already check the rankings)
Housing for freshmen?
Campus safety?
Campus Vibe? She is not a party girl, she is nerd-like, but very social.
One thing that is important to her is the research oportunities to undergraduates.
I´ll be very grateful to any answer.
UCSB has a superb physics department, congratulations to your daughter! Has she looked into UCSB’s College of Creative Studies? It includes physics. It’s a highly selective program in which undergrads can go straight into graduate-level classes and research. Here’s the link.
I have a family member who got his PhD in physics at Santa Barbara, so I’m biased. He LOVED the school and its opportunities (he was in College of Creative Studies.) Santa Barbara is stunning, the campus is beautiful – on a cliff overlooking the beach – the weather is almost perfect, in short, it’s a little paradise. Yes, UCSB is a party school – but there’s also a large studious community, and because it’s a large school (just like UW, UMass) anyone can find “their people”, even social non-partiers 
All of these have fine physics programs. The rankings for physics departments is usually based on their graduate programs not their undergraduate majors. The physics curriculum is more or less the same at all universities in the U.S. and a good student can get into a graduate program (if that is the goal) from any one of these three. In this case, i would choose based on finances, location or other aspects of the university that she finds appealing. The physics will be fine at all three and she will have research opportunities available at any of them.
All three are good, however UCSB has an excellent science department.
Do you mind paying 58k per year for UCSB or 50k for U of Washington? Or 45k at UMass?
Personally, I’d choose UW-Seattle.
UCSB is under-funded. If you check the course catalog, you’ll see that even upper-level physics courses are closed for enrollment because the course limit has been reached. I would not want to attend a university where it’s a struggle just to get into the core courses for my major.
Aren’t many state universities in CA under funded these days?
^ Yes!!!
Which is why I was so surprised that everyone on this thread is recommending UCSB. Yes, the weather is nice, but does that make up for not getting into the courses you want to take?
Also super expensive.
I would choose UW or UMass Amherst
Amplifying on what @katliamom says:
I think the difficulties of getting into classes at the UCs are exaggerated. Everyone in my family went/is going to/recently graduated from UCs – Cal, Santa Barbara, UCLA & Davis among them. Everyone graduated in 4 years; a niece actually managed to graduate in 3 from UCLA last year. Although it’s true that you have to be careful with how you register for what, and when. You also have to be proactive and persistent in getting the courses you need. However, it CAN be done.
OP, please note that admission to College of Creative Studies requires a separate application since it’s sort of a school-within-a-school.
Compare this to the way registration works at some other universities: pick out 10 classes that sound interesting, register for the 5 classes that are most likely to fill up, attend all 10 for a week, keep the 5 that you’re most interested in and update your registration to reflect that choice.
This strategy allowed me to have a schedule every semester that I was happy with, in terms of workload balance, engaging instructors, having a non-committal way of trying things I wasn’t sure I’d be interested in, etc. And it was only possible because most classes didn’t fill up, giving me the flexibility to change my registration until the add/drop deadline 3 weeks into the semester.
^many state universities don’t work like that though. There’s a shopping period when students who want to get into a class are placed on a waitlist for the class and you have to check often to see if you moved up in the waitlist and need to accept your spot or not.
But you’re right, UCs are underfunded, which is why the chancelor is trying to get money from the governor, restoring per-student funding to pre-crisis levels, now that there’s a surplus it’d be good investment imho.
You can do the same at the UCs, barum. Of course, the UCs don’t generally offer the cushy experience of the tiny LAC you attended, nor your richer-than-most-countries grad school 
Nonetheless, the UCs manage to graduate thousands of undergrads every year – attract the nation’s top grads to its grad programs – and its world-class faculty manage to win a respectable number of Nobel Prizes. A few of those Nobels in the past decade went to UCSB, and at CCS, undergrads can even work with some of them.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that at the UCs, it’s no longer as difficult to get classes as it was during the recession. That’s the consensus of many people on this forum, and it’s been the case with my relatives currently studying there, or those who graduated in the past couple of years.
Even my under-funded local public university in Germany with a 50:1 student-to-faculty ratio managed to offer enough courses + sections that nobody had to beg to get into the core courses for their major!
You don’t think it’s a bad sign that upper-level physics courses fill up and close for enrollment? These are physics classes for peet’s sake. Not fluffy fun courses half of the university wants to take.
Regardless of whether it’s a “problem”, a shortage of course seats is certainly not a “desirable” feature. This is an international student asking for pointers to help decide between several excellent universities, all of which are roughly equally expensive for them. Why go to the one where course registration will be in issue?
@b@rlum, I have not seen any upper division math or physics courses filled up and closed at the drop-date point. In other words, by add-drop date, there is always room in a class- not in a specific section, perhaps. That is for LA or Berkeley. I assume the same is true for SB.
Also, I am truly amazed that @katliamom did not take the opportunity to point out that the limit for number of credits at CCS is 90/quarter (where the normal load is 15), that all pre-reqs are waived to register for any undergraduate or graduate UCSB class, and that add/drop date is the week before finals week. UCSB/CCS would accommodate a proactive, independent student just fine. They allow so much freedom from red-tape and proactively encourage UG research.
Why would one consider another college? (see post #1).
Pretty much all large colleges have a bit of a party reputation - hence the nickname ZooMass. Seattle is more urban, but Seattle is a pretty great city. However being urban it is likely the least safe, although I don’t consider it particularly unsafe. I would think Santa Barbara would be quite safe -although they had a horrific incident it was a one off situation and could have happened anywhere. UMass had some crazy party rioting last year but I don’t know how often it gets that out of hand, probably never. I have never visited there, but I love Seattle and Santa Barbara, pretty much everyone does, but they do complain about the abundance of rain in Seattle. SB has wonderful weather.
Somehow I find it not very credible that upper division students can’t get into classes in their major at SB. I might look into that more.
@itsjustschool, I didn’t go into specifics of CCS because it’s such an unusual (and uber-selective) program. I was speaking about UCs in general, and the often-exaggerated claims how hard it is to get classes. (Those claims are often made by people with no recent first-hand UC experience, I noticed.) The claim about difficulty of getting upper division courses also sounds HIGHLY dubious to me, since so many of them – even at huge schools as UCLA or Cal – are in fact often quite small. That’s another myth that needs dispelling, by the way: that these schools only have classes with 300+ people.
What is “Cal” you are talking about @katliamom ?
The UCSB course schedules are public, including the total capacity of each course + section and the number of students enrolled. I merely noted that many of the courses were at capacity; which suggests that not everyone who might have been interested was allowed to enroll. (Yes, the courses are small. But I’d rather have a quantum mechanics course with 50 seats that can accommodate everyone, than a course with 25 seats and some majors struggling to take it.)
LOL @paul2752.
You get a pass for being an international. The first public university in California was modeled after Yale, and known simply as the University of California, or ‘Cal’. It was built in the city of Berkeley, California.
As additional campuses were added in the University of California system, the Berkeley campus retained its nickname ‘Cal’. Within the UC system, UC Berkeley is still referred to as ‘Cal’, and you can buy all sorts of swag so emblazoned.