University of California-Santa Barbara Top Questions

There is alot of pressure to succeed, and students not at the top of their class can feel left behind.

if you don't find the right group of people freshman year, it can be hard to branch out of your friendship circle later on in your college career. there are a lot of people who drink and party a lot and if you accidentally make friends with them freshman year it can be tough to find others out there who don't need to drink all the time.

It's a little bit north of Santa Barbara, so if you have a job in the city, you need a car to get there. Santa Barbara is a very expensive place to live.

too many white people

I would consider the amount of drinking to be the worst thing about my school because it seems as though that is the only way that you will be accepted into the "cool" group of people; however, there are those few who don't participate in drinking and that is fun once you find them.

The worst thing about the school is annoying drunk people. There are parties every night of the week. I like to party in moderation, but people who don't care about school irritate me because I worked hard to get here.

There are a lot of large lecture classes and it is hard to avoid taking them because many times these classes are prerequisites for upper division classes.

It reputation for being a party school. Although a large percentage of the population engages in social events where alcohol is involved, UCSB is no different than any other college in terms of partying. The only difference is that the partying is more visible here because students all live within the same square mile, thus it creates more of a scene. Also, the cost to live in Isla Vista is OUTRAGEOUS for how slumy it is. The community takes advantage of the college students.

Number of rapes around campus because of sick, drunk men trying to take advantage of women. BE CAREFUL!!

Partying sometimes gets out of control, especially in residences closer to school. A lot of people seems to think college =party, which can get annoying from time to time. And house rents are off the roof, they want ridiculously high rents for mediocre apartments.

People only see our party repuation but this school offers a great environment to expand oneself academically and socially.

Lack of ethnic diversity, old lab equipment

You don't truly get to appreciate the expertise of the professors until your third year, so it makes finding the perfect major a bit difficult for some people.

That they use graduate students to teach classes because students are paying a lot of money to receive a faulty education. They also aren't willing to work well with financial issues and don't care to hear unique cases. They are money hungry.

Some of the outlets in the library do not work. It is annoying.

Although getting into the classes is usually not a problem, sometimes the class sizes are to great. Being in an impacted major, biology, often means being in a class of 800 students. This makes it difficult to interact with the professor as well as having personal questions answered. Such large class sizes make it difficult to concentrate in class and makes a student feel more like a number than an actual person.

Some of the neighborhoods around the school are not very high income oriented and the main neighborhhood right next to the school where most students live is technically a ghetto-like neighborhood but with very high rent prices. Some of the classes have very large lecture halls where too many students are in the class to where there is little chance of communicating with the professor.

There are no big sports teams that some colleges have, such as no football team.