Tell me about UC-Santa Barbara

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wondered what kind of school UC Santa Barbara was really like (never totally trust DCUM to disseminate all the info), and it turns out they have six Nobel Prize winners from 1998 to 2014. Yep, just last year.

Doesn't mean it's not a party school but it definitely isn't the academic dump that most here make it out to be.

I don't think anyone has suggested that UCSB is an academic dump. But it may be that non-Californians don't realize that even the middling UCs are very strong schools. There's a kind of three-tiered system in CA with community colleges at the bottom, CSUs in the center, and UCs at the top. (Don't know where the Cal Polys belong!). Unlike other states, the flagship public university doesn't monopolize all the talent (student or faculty) and departments and individuals from other UCs are nationally and, in some cases, internationally recognized.

Basically, it's a huge state, that, historically has put lots of money into higher education, and where many academics are happy to be. But Californians sometimes take that for granted, while people from other states, extrapolating from their own public university systems, might assume that once you move beyond the top university or two, the other schools are attractive primarily to people for whom they are cheap and/or local. Not true of the UCs. CSUs fill that (crucial) niche.