<p>Basically, my theory is this. People will choose the best school possible. When rankings are equivalent, people will tend to choose the closer school. This helps Irvine which is in a population of millions, compared to SB, which only has 200,000 people living within about 45 minutes of campus.</p>
<p>I also believe that there is an elastic relationship between the strength of the economy and number of applicants to more isolated schools like UCSC and UCSB. Many people may seriously consider becoming commuter students in order to save money. Now many UCs have this possibility:</p>
<p>UC Davis: Sacramento metro area
UC Berkeley: entire East Bay and San Francisco within easy public transporation
UCLA: obviously
UC Irvine: Orange County
UC Riverside: Inland empire population
UCSD: San Diego metro area</p>
<p>UCSC and UCSBs aren’t located by huge metro areas comparatively. UCSC has San Jose about 40 minutes away and UCSB has Ventura county about an hour away.</p>
<p>Hehe, it’s not so bad. The best or safest towns in the country don’t necessarily translate to the most conducive socially to an undergraduate population. I found that living in Davis, there was definitely a tension between residents and students over noise and student rowdiness and the like. I assume that the same exists in Irvine. However, in SB, where the population in Isla Vista is mostly students (13,000 out of the 18,000 are either UCSB or SBCC students), this constraint doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>That’s reason #1 why UCSB earned the reputation of a party school.</p>
<p>Reason #2 has to do with many of the statistics in this thread. It is far for home for most people. Many schools have large local populations for whom it is easy to go home for the weekend. Even in Davis I found that many would take the easy 1 hour 15 minute trek back to most points in the Bay Area. At Santa Cruz, even though isolated, my brother reported the same thing.</p>
<p>However, in SB, it’s at least 4.5 hours to get to the Bay Area. And with weekend traffic in LA? Well, I remember it taking 3 hours for me to get to Redondo Beach to visit a friend. This is completely anecdotal but I would bet everything I have to say that UCSB has the smallest proportion of people to go home for the weekend. Hence a livelier environment. Even as a NorCaler I never once felt lonely on campus because it was always so active. My SoCal friends would maybe go back once during a quarter only for major family events. </p>
<p>Anyway, I just want to say that pick UCSB! You’ll have fun. The ranking differential between mid-tier UCs is very small and UCSB’s capped enrollment will result in stronger future classes. Take it easy :)</p>
<p>You can see that for all schools, the yield rate is highest in the area where the campus is located. This is more evidence that many tend to chose the UC closest to them geographically.</p>
<p>That’s some good analysis rc251 on the yield rate rc251.</p>
<p>I’m afraid I’m still not convinced that UCSB is academically on par with UCI or UCD though. When compared, people tend to cite UCSB’s social scene as a major plus, but it really doesn’t say much about their academics? It just seems not very many people I know take SB very seriously. It is definitely the fall-back school for the ones who were hurt by the low admission rates at UCI and UCD.</p>
<p>Well, instead of taking a look at the stats of accepted students, lets take enrolled students at these 3 campuses. Using StatFinder, I get these results for the entering class of Fall 2008.</p>
<p>So this shows that for the Fall 2008 class, enrolled students had the same levels of academic strength at each of these 3 schools (the one outlier being that UCSB enrollees averaged 23 more points on their total SAT reasoning scores than both Davis and Irvine enrollees). Of course, the gap may be smaller for UCSB this year, but we don’t know who’s going to enroll in the school for Fall 2009, so we can’t make a judgment on what will happen this year.</p>
<p>I think the reason SB gets a bad “rap” is that many somehow associate partying with a student body of lower intelligence. However, schools like the University of Wisconsin-Madison (which outranks UCSB in most party school polls, yet is ranked #35 nationally on US News) prove that this stereotype is very false.</p>
<p>More interesting stats. Another stereotype is that many students drop out due to partying. Lets look at the 6 year graduation rate at the mid tier schools using the latest available data. (This statistic represents the percentage of students who enrolled as freshman who ended up graduating after 6 years). I also included 1 year persistence rate, that is, the percentage of students who return for a 2nd year. (The 6 year graduation rate is from enrollees of 2002, and the 1 year persistence rate is from the enrollees 2007).</p>
<p>School|1 Year Persistence Rate|6 Year Graduation Rate</p>
<p>That’s right folks. While UCI has the highest rate of freshmen returning, UCSB actually has the highest graduation rate among the mid-tier UCs. That squashes the rumor that UCSB students drop out due to too much partying. Oh, and UC GPA at graduation (using enrollees of 2001, the newest year this data is available):</p>
<p>UCD: 3.03
UCI: 3.10
UCSB: 3.19</p>
<p>So not only do SB students graduate at the highest percentages, they also have the highest GPAs by far.</p>
<p>Haha, yeah, enrolled stats always kind of throw me off as to how low they are. However, you have to figure that most of the enrollees are going to be in the bottom tier of accepted students for that particular school; people who had better stats likely got accepted to better schools and chose those instead. </p>
<p>However, I think this data shows (and US News, which uses many of these factors) that the schools are roughly equivalent, and that while students at SB party, they do just as well as their peers in Davis and Irvine. </p>
<p>And yawn, my personal anecdotal theory is that happy students do better in school. I can’t really see anyone being unhappy at SB :)</p>
<p>"Look at the trends. UCSB went from 54.7% to 48.4%. UCI went from 55.6% to 42.8%. And UCD went from 58.5% to 46.2%. UCI and UCD both started higher, and ended lower.</p>
<p>Moreover, each of these trends was consistent over three years."</p>
<p>That’s only over a period of 3 years. That’s pretty dam short. And it only proves to show that the rates go up and down. It’s unpredictable; UCSB could be lower next year and Irvine and Davis may be higher. </p>
<p>"^ Maybe that just means UCSB is easier. "
Or maybe that just means you’ve been disproven by his statistics.</p>
Something tells me you didn’t understand the scenario. The fact that UCSB graduates more students and at higher GPA’s doesn’t disprove anything I said (especially considering I never said anything about UCSB’s graduates rates or GPAs), and it could be because UCSB is easier.</p>
<p>Haha, alright, lets keep a happy environment here. I think it was WCF who was more concerned about how UCSB ranked among the mid-tier UCs, and his impressions that UCSB was at the bottom. Perhaps you can argue about classes in regards to the GPA and graduation rates, however, I think they do provide some insight. And the enrolled statistics definitely show that the three schools take in equally talented students. (On another note, the statistics also show that it is wrong to put SC and Riverside on the same tier as many people do, as Santa Cruz enrollees have much higher statistics such as .15 higher GPAs and 150 point higher combined SAT scores than Riverside. Just an FYI).</p>
<p>I just wander, why you do not compare engineering school with engineering school (GPA of admitted, GPA of graduates…), but instead just trying to compare the fruit baskets with different mix???</p>
<p>^That’s like saying the University of California admittance statistics are incomparable because they aggregate all the different undergraduate college acceptances together. One would assume that with the large student bodies, the GPAs would be roughly similar between the UCs in their different respective colleges. If you’d like to find the data on that, knock yourself out.</p>
<p>I just saw something on here and apparently back in 1994 UCSB had the highest acceptance rate of all of them, higher than UCSC and UCR. UCSB has certainly come a long way since 1994.</p>
<p>That is true. Chancelor Yang systematically improved all the weaknesses of UCSB. He knows what he is doing. While all the other UCs are yammering for Law schools, Medical schools and Business schools, UCSB is just concentrating on improving what it has. Its sole purpose is to conduct research. Which in turn is improving the quality of education and they are following the Princeton’s model of education. Keep it small, dont drain the funds and be the best in what they do. </p>