UCSC might be great for CS. My cousin went there and its proximity to tech companies is a huge advantage. Sure, there’s also Stanford students in the mix, but lots of CS majors from UCSC are able to get jobs at great companies My cousin bounced around quite a bit. He started at a small startup company. Then he went onto Google and worked on the camera tech for Google Maps. Most recently, he’s working at Apple. My vote would be for UCSC, but what does your heart tell you? UCI isn’t bad either. Some of my CS professors at USC did their undergrad at UCI.