Hi all,
I am getting ready to apply and I was wondering which of these two UC schools was more suited for me. I am from New York, love the beach and surfing, and value a school with sports and school spirit. I have a 34 ACT, some decent extracurriculars, and have a 93 average. I don’t want to go to a school that’s just known as a party school because prestige is important to me, but I want to have fun while getting a good education. Based on all of this, which school should I apply to?
Apply to both. Applying to one more UC entails just checking another box (and paying another fee) on the general UC application. Both fit your criteria pretty well. Both are very near the beach and are academically rigorous. SB has more of a party school reputation.
Neither school has a football team, so the really big college sports focus is not there, but the campus sports culture is probably a little stronger at Santa Barbara. For a really big time sports culture you need to consider UCLA or UC Berkeley.
So it looks like a toss-up to me. What is your intended major? That may help drive the decision.
I agree with @Scipio to apply to both since UC admissions can be unpredictable. Also make sure they are affordable. As an OOS applicant, expect to pay close to full fees to attend $60K/year. No financial aid available to OOS students.
I would like to study business or econ
Neither UCSD or UCSB have a Business school, so Econ will be your choice as a major.
UCSB offers Econ or Econ and Accounting. For both majors you are accepted as a Pre-Econ major and then have to take the pre-req courses and meet the GPA requirement before declaring the major.
https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/catalog/Current/CollegesDepartments/ls-intro/econ.aspx?DeptTab=Undergraduate
For UCSD, Economics is a capped major meaning you again need to meet specific GPA and pre-req requirements before declaring the major. Also, when applying to UCSD and a capped major, you should select an alternate non-capped major.
https://economics.ucsd.edu/undergraduate-program/entry-to-the-majors.html
I went to UCSB. It is a popular misconception that it is just a party school. For me personally, I picked UCSB over UCSD for a couple of reasons:
It’s been a long time since I graduated from there and UCSB’s reputation for only being a party school is still alive and strong. If you want to spend every weekend drunk, it’s easy to find those options at UCSB. But those options also exist at UCSD. And Stanford. And Harvard.
Neither UCSB or UCSD are big time Division 1 or 2 sports schools. You won’t have football games to attend in a big college stadium. No football cheerleaders. But the UCSB basketball games were super fun and at least when I went there, students got tickets for free. The games against UNLV were a lot of fun and really rowdy.
Most people don’t realize that UCSB has had several Nobel laureates in residence there. And for quite awhile, Steven Hawking conducted research at UCSB’s Institute for Theoretical Physics.
If you like to surf or if you want to learn how to surf, then you should absolutely go to UCSB over UCSD. And you’d get a really great education in addition to that.
Why not throw UCLA into the mix as well. Bus Econ offered and there is certainly good surfing in LA. It would also meet your desire for “prestige”.
UCSB is def becoming less of a party school year by year, and even that has always been kind of a misconception. It’s getting harder to get into (average gpa was a 4.25 this year, the highest in the history of the school) and people are starting to realize the prestige of UCSB a lot more I’d say.
“Neither UCSD or UCSB have a Business school, so Econ will be your choice as a major.”
UCSD does have a Business school - The Rady School of Management. It’s offers primarily graduate degrees, but it also has some nice undergrad minors including an undergrad minor in Business: