Hello,
Recently I was admitted to both UCM and UCSC and I’m trying to decide which offer to accept.
UCSC. They have a stronger, more established engineering department with great connections to Silicon Valley. UCM is great, but can’t compare to UCSC for CS.
The choice depends on what you want to do for a career. With Computer Engineering at UCSC it appears that you focus more on the hardware side of things. Read the page at https://www.soe.ucsc.edu/degree-programs/computer-engineering-bs to see your choice of concentrations with this major.
If your interest is in programming then the choice is Merced since that is a traditional CS major. The link above at UCSC discusses one concentration their major offers and says
This concentration is the closest one to a computer science major-the main differences are that it does not require computer science theory courses, but because of the core computer engineering requirements, includes more hardware and electronics than a computer science bachelor’s degree.
If you don’t want to be taking lots of hardware and electronics courses including the heavily calculus-based Signals & Systems (all these courses are hard, BTW) then look more into Merced. I just skimmed their catalog, but it does seem more like a traditional CS major. Unfortunately the Merced website doesn’t make it that easy to understand what the major requires, so you’ll have to dig more.
I suggest you carefully investigate and make sure you understand the differences in what you’ll study depending on which of these you attend before you decide.