Applications to the UC Santa Barbara Graduate Division have generally increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, fewer recent UCSB undergraduates have gone on to pursue a master’s or doctoral degree since 2021, per UCSB Institutional Research, Planning & Assessment’s 2022 Undergraduate Alumni Longitudinal Report.
According to the report, the rate of full-time employment after graduation for UCSB students has stayed consistent at about 63% since 2014, while the rate of undergraduate UCSB students pursuing master’s or doctoral degrees has dropped to around 30% since the increase to about 35% seen in 2020 for 2022 graduated seniors.
In contrast, the number of applications to UCSB’s Graduate Division has increased by about 9% from 9,239 to 10,086 since 2020, according to UCSB Graduate Statistics. The demographics of applicants to the UCSB Graduate Division have also changed over the past application year. Admission of white non-Hispanic students dropped by 18% (from 42% to 24%) from the 2024 application year to the 2025 application year, while admission of Asian or Pacific Islander students increased by 15% in the same time frame. International students comprised 8% more of the admitted students, climbing from 39% to 47% between 2024 and 2025. Admission of female students rose 12%, from 45% to 57%, from 2024 to 2025.
Only 39% of UCSB graduating seniors from 2021 and 2022 chose to attend graduate school immediately following graduation, 62% of which were going into a master’s program, according to the report. The most common fields that UCSB undergraduates intended to study in graduate school were business or marketing and science, math or statistics, according to the 2020-2022 Graduating Senior Survey summary report by UCSB Institutional Research, Planning & Assessment.
Leila Rupp, a professor in the feminist studies department and Interim Dean of the Graduate Division for UCSB, explained recent trends regarding the Graduate Division.
“It’s hard to know if it’s the pandemic, but there have been some real big shifts during the pandemic,” Rupp said. “We had a big drop right after the pandemic in graduate enrollment. Last year, we had the biggest increase. We had more students coming in than we’ve ever had before.”
The proportion of students enrolled in a master’s program at UCSB decreased from 24% to 20% for the 2020-21 admissions cycle, while students getting their doctoral degree increased from 76% to 80% the same year, according to UCSB Graduate Statistics. 27% of graduate students enrolled at UCSB in 2024 were in the engineering division, 24% were in math, life and physical sciences, 15% were in education, 14% were in humanities and fine arts and 9% were in social sciences.
The percentage of white, non-Hispanic students enrolled UCSB graduate students dropped from 42% in the 2020-21 cycle to 34% in the 2024-25 cycle. Almost 55% of graduate students from the United States enrolled in fall 2023 were white, according to the Council of Graduate Schools’ Graduate Enrollment and Degrees.
In 2021, post-baccalaureate enrollment across the U.S. had increased by 5% compared to 2019. This increase is almost completely accounted for by an increase in female enrollment, from 1.8 million female enrollees in 2019 to 2 million in 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. However, UCSB female graduate student enrollment only increased 1%, from 45% in 2019 to 46% in 2021, according to the UCSB Graduate Division.
In addition to graduate school, professional schools — such as medical school or law school — are an avenue of postgraduate education that undergraduate students can choose to pursue.
“We have between 250 to 270 [applications to medical school] every year [from UCSB graduates or soon-to-be graduates] … COVID didn't have an appreciable impact on that,” David Lawrence, a pre-health advisor at UCSB, said. “I don't think COVID had, insofar as I've been able to tell, an appreciable impact on the [medical school] acceptance rates either … The last two application cycles at UCSB have been the most successful in UCSB history. I don't think that has anything to do with COVID.”
Although Lawrence doesn’t attribute the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to the recent success of UCSB students’ admissions into medical schools, he noted that during the pandemic, he discerned an increase in the number of gap years that pre-PA students — students who seek to become physician assistants — took.
“My anecdotal observations are that [there was an increase in] the number of gap years that PA students in particular had to take on [because they need to work] entry level jobs as an EMT, as a scribe in an emergency room somewhere, as a medical assistant for a local pediatrician or dermatologist [prior to applying to PA school],” Lawrence said. “They [didn’t have] ready access to those kinds of things during the pandemic, to those sorts of jobs, and as a result, the gap years for PA students were certainly something I saw go up. Instead of applying one year after graduation, they're now applying 2, 3, 4 years after graduation.”
Lawrence qualifies, however, that the pandemic may not necessarily be the sole or direct cause of the change in the number of gap years taken by UCSB graduates seeking to apply to PA programs.
“[The change in the number of gap years taken] is not necessarily a pandemic product. It could be somebody like, ‘Well, I was working in investment banking and was miserable, and I wanted to make a difference,’” Lawrence said. “If you do a career change [those years are] still considered gap years. So I don't know if I can hang it all on the pandemic.”
Lawrence said that he did not think that the restricted access to clinical work that prospective PA students experienced during the pandemic affected the number of UCSB graduates who applied to PA programs.
“Every year we have about 120 or so PA applicants, and that's been a fairly consistent number, even pre-pandemic,” Lawrence said.
According to UCSB Health Professions Advising, the number of applications sent by UCSB applicants through the Centralized Application Service for Physician Assistants, the system through which students apply to PA programs, remained at 111 for both the 2021-22 and 2022-23 admissions cycles.
UCSB graduates are continuing to matriculate to medical schools within the University of California system in high numbers, which Lawrence said has been the case for several years.
“That is a long standing tradition. Most students, understandably, would like to stay in California [because of] proximity to family, support networks [and] cost,” Lawrence said.
UCSB pre-law advisor Miguel Moran-Lanier emphasized that students should generally explore postgraduate paths before they graduate.
“I refer to this as ‘post-graduation transition planning’ … What we’re trying to avoid is some student being at commencement thinking, ‘Oh my goodness … where do I start?’ at a point where a lot of their resources are going away,” Moran-Lanier said.
Moran-Lanier does not think that using graduate or professional school as a means to do that exploration is always efficient.
“Going to graduate school, professional school, it’s a pretty significant commitment, and if somebody is not quite sure about what they want to do, it makes sense to think about it [first],” Moran-Lanier said.
Regarding pre-law students, Moran-Lanier said, “Law school is there for you if you want to do the work that lawyers do … My sense is that the people that were less satisfied around that time with law were people who didn’t want to be lawyers themselves.”
Moran-Lanier noted that it may be too soon to tell if the number of students showing interest in the pre-law track specifically has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Fluctuations happen around major events, and then they last a while,” Moran-Lanier said. “Right after the pandemic, there was an increase in the number of applications to law school and that has steadily declined, but just a tiny bit … it’s too soon to tell if that’s part of a pattern or not.”
Rupp emphasized that the decision to seek further education or enter the workforce can vary from individual to individual, based on career goals and broader trends. Additionally, the decision one makes between working or pursuing postgraduate education after completing their undergraduate degree does not necessarily mean that they are committing themselves to a singular path.
“Students just have to decide ‘What do I want to do right now?,’ but it’s not a decision for your whole life because you can decide to go back to graduate school if you go into industry,” Rupp said.
A version of this article appeared on p. 12 and p. 13 of the Jan. 16, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.