UC Santa Barbara’s campus boasts ocean views and the No. 13 spot among the highest-regarded public universities in the country, according to the U.S. News & World Report. Despite this, Santa Barbara locals tend to enroll at the campus in low numbers compared to overall UCSB enrollment.
146 students from the Santa Barbara school district enrolled at UCSB between 2019 and 2023, including both freshman and transfer students. Nexus File Photo
The Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD) contains five high schools including Dos Pueblos, San Marcos, Santa Barbara, Alta Vista and La Cuesta. The district has roughly 12,500 students overall with about 90% of seniors graduating per year.
Several factors contribute to low enrollment at UCSB by local students, Santa Barbara High School College & Career Readiness Specialist Spencer Barr said, including students wanting to explore places outside their hometown and financial barriers.
“I’m seeing more students accepted to schools and be accepted to a variety of schools nationwide, but the financial aid packages, it doesn’t get to where it needs to get for a lot of students to be able to afford that,” he said.
According to Barr, 146 seniors from the SBUSD enrolled at UCSB between 2019 and 2023. Comparably, the fall 2023 freshman class alone had 5,043 students — the largest admitted class at the time, increasing offers to California residents by 15%.
According to Barr, another reason fewer local students may be enrolling in UCSB is because K-12 public enrollment has decreased nationwide.
Trends in migration and birth rates have caused enrollment in California’s public K-12 schools to drop by 5.2% between fall 2019 to fall 2023 — one of the largest drops in the country. It decreased for the seventh year in a row for the 2023-24 school year.
From the beginning of the academic year to the University of California application deadline in November, staff members such as Barr aid students in the process.
“So my day-to-day — there isn’t an easy way to say it, it’s a little chaotic,” Barr said.
The Santa Barbara High School College and Career Center assists the entire school — a little over 2,000 students — on a drop-in basis. Students go to the center seeking guidance on anything from college applications to financial aid.
On the other side of the process is UCSB Executive Director of Admissions Cuca Acosta, who said that many students wishing to attend school elsewhere contributed to the low number of local students at UCSB.
“For those who want to grow and sort of be more independent, leaving Santa Barbara County as a whole is actually a really positive experience for them,” Acosta said. “And so we’re there to support them through the application process, and we’re there to support them with the idea of, you know, don’t forget about us, but we in the admissions office aren’t here to sell and we’re not here to create a quota.”
UCSB had an average acceptance rate of 31% for SBUSD high schools for fall 2023. Data was not available for the two alternative and continuation schools in the district. In contrast, the overall acceptance rate for UCSB that year was 28%.
This situation is not unique to UCSB. Local students across most of the UCs were accepted at similar rates in comparison to all applicants in 2023. Most local school districts had a less than 5% difference between the district’s average acceptance rate and the rate for all applicants, as seen in the graph below.
There was no data for continuation schools and some of the high schools within certain school districts. Lance Sanchez / Daily Nexus
While local acceptance rates are similar or even higher than general acceptance rates, the overall cost of attendance may deter students from committing to four-year universities such as UCSB. According to the U.S. News & World Report, 31.5% of students in SBUSD are “economically disadvantaged.”
“Access to higher ed [in terms of students accepted], in my opinion, is actually increasing. However, the chances for students to actually go, I would say, are decreasing a little bit, and it’s in large part due to just finances,” Barr said. “The cost of college keeps going up. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the student’s income is going up, or their family’s income is going up …”
The average cost of attendance for California residents attending a UC is over $40,000, before financial aid. Barr encourages students to apply for scholarships to cover costs that federal and state financial aid may not cover, or which some students may not be eligible for.
“A UC, for example, there’s the same number of students being accepted, but there’s a lot more students applying,” he said. “But the ones that are accepted and they want to go, potentially, they just can’t afford it.”
At times, students may choose to attend community college first, as attending a community college is often a less costly alternative due to the California College Promise Grant, which provides free tuition for two years of community college to eligible students. According to Barr, about 60% of SBUSD seniors in the last couple of years chose to attend community college first.
Barr said several UCSB student organizations and departments conduct outreach programs for students in SBUSD to expose them to the campus, including El Congreso, Young Entrepreneurs Program and Kids in Nature Environmental Outreach. Events organized by student organizations are usually held during the spring after planning throughout the academic year.
Barr said that renting out buses, signing up students to visit the university on weekends and trying to space out all of the events becomes an obstacle for the high school to attend these events. He also emphasized that low numbers of local students are tied to students wanting to branch out from their homes for college.
“[Students] want to kind of spread their wings a bit and try something new, so that definitely, I would say it takes out about 30 to 40% of our senior class right off the bat that want to leave,” he said.
A local herself, Acosta graduated from UCSB with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 2001. She said that since her application process, a few factors have changed including the digitization and the accessibility of campus information online. Acosta said that as part of the admissions office, she hopes that local students choose UCSB but ultimately wants them to find the school that’s right for them.
“We want local students. We embrace them. We hope that they think of us as a viable option, but we support and hope that they find the right fit,” Acosta said.
A version of this article appeared on p. 6 of the Feb. 20, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.
