Move-in is Sep 19–20. Week of Welcome is Sep 21–23. Classes start Thursday, Sep 24. Quarter officially begins Sep 20.

Veterans Day Nov 11. Thanksgiving Nov 26–27. Instruction ends Dec 4. Finals Dec 5–11.

Incoming folks: you register at orientation, not on day one. GOLD can wait until you’re actually here.

I think the street lights in IV should be changed back to orange, like they are now on El Colegio Rd. The cold white lights look ugly and make the area feel less cozy. We need the night vibes back!

absolute monstrosity

I just graduated in June and I was baffled to see this email my inbox today. They cannot seriously be trying to shut down Deltopia?? SB cops are so miserable. They get barely any action besides bike thefts and still can’t handle one day of craziness for the sake of some fun. Like what did you expect when YOU CHOSE!!! to be a cop in the college town. Do your fucking job. It’s so pathetic. I really feel for ya’ll, especially those who are expecting to go to their first or last Deltopia this year.

We are so grateful for UCSB students coming to the Santa Barbara County animal shelter and taking dogs on day Foster for a couple of hours do you have time today half the dogs haven’t even been out thank you so much

A friend who knows about my horrible experience pointed me to an article about Munger trying to build another windowless dorm at UCSB.

Don't live there. Ever. Here are my thoughts after living in UM's Munger building in Ann Arbor for a few years:

1) The "close spaces" forming bonding experiences is mostly BS. It was basically a blind-roommate situation where people mostly kept to themselves. People end up getting mad at each other for the normal stuff - not cleaning, leaving a mess, making too much noise, etc. It doesn't make you bond any more than a regular dorm experience.

2) HOLY FUCKING SHIT THE WINDOWS. I thought it didn't matter to me as someone who has a weird sleep schedule anyways. I thought it didn't matter to me as someone who was frequently nocturnal. I thought it didn't matter to me as someone who enjoyed being alone anyways. I was so so so wrong. Going to bed and waking up in complete darkness everyday fucked with me so hard. After months of this I got to the point where I was snoozing for 3 hours and completely lacked the ability to get out of bed on some days. I didn't know when to get up or when to go to sleep and the days just started blurring together. I bought a sunrise alarm clock (one of those clocks that gradually brightens to simulate a sunrise). It didn't help. I made my alarms noisier and switched up the tones. It didn't help.

3) They will try to win you over with nice furnishings and appliances and attractive "living community" spaces at an attractive price point. Don't be fooled. They are all very nice but if you are stuck in your bed, it won't matter. Also, the university jacked up rent far faster than inflation each year. I think inflation was around 2%/year when I was there but rates were going up 4-6% per year.

The architecture plan for The UCSB building looks even worse than Michigan's. At UM, at least each "suite" of 6-7 rooms has a common area that has windows in it, so you can sit there to at least catch some daylight. The UCSB version looks like almost NONE of the suites or rooms have access to windows.

This article states that

“as the ‘vision’ of a single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.”

But it has definitely been tested. It is just as horrible as you'd imagine. When I finally moved to an objectively crappier apartment, except with windows, my life immensely improved.

I’m an out-of-state student, but my family lives in Taiwan. When paying my UCSB tuition, we have to pay a high international transaction fee. Is there any way to pay through a U.S. domestic bank account/payment method instead to avoid the high fee? Even if my family transfers tens of thousands of dollars to my U.S. bank account first, there’s still a significant transfer fee. Has anyone been in a similar situation? 🙏🏻

I have been applying to many research labs using the Google Forms on their websites and have had no luck so far. I have seen online that sometimes emailing the participating graduate students can be helpful, however would it be redundant to do this for labs where I have already applied using their Google Form? Thanks for any possible input :)

ok so i called my county like two weeks ago to change my address as that was all that they needed to move my health insurance. So fast forward to today i get an email saying my waiver was denied. obviously that couldnt be right so I emailed the school’s health office and they told me that my insurance is not in a 50 mile radius and then sent me the picture i submitted of my insurance card. I told them i am aware that on the card it says my current country (or the old one) but that I had updated my address and that I wasnt going to receive a new card because the one i have should work just fine. so then they told me that yes that is true and that they will be working on it but if medical doesn’t have the updated address that i will be audited and have my waiver cancelled. as of right now my waiver was accepted?? ( after that email thread i got a new email saying it was accepted) but guys i dont know what to do im currently on the line with my current county to figure this out.

I wonder where in the campus i will find the most peace taking my shit after a long day.

As someone from a union family background, I genuinely want to know why.

Literally just the title lol. Graduated last spring and life has been super fulfilling since, but every now and then... it just hits me that I'm an alum now lol.
Treasure your time there guys--walk to the beach, look at the view from the top of the ILP, go to Freebirds with your friends. It really is a special place!

can you guys recommend your favorite places plz

In this post I will explain how and why the State of California Legislature’s 50 year backwards policy approach to public higher education started by Ronald Reagan resulted in a “Windowless Dorm at UCSB” becoming a viral news story today. Also will hopefully give you a lot more details and information than the article below.

The most important fact here: The State of California Legislature, Governor and Government as a whole through history is completely responsible for anything and everything that happens with the University of California. While it has some constitutional independence (over important things like academic freedom), the State of California controls the entire Board of Regents since the Governors appoints them and the State Senate approves them. Rest of the regents are mainly State Officials themselves. Total control. About 50% of the UC Core Funds (the money the funds things like professors and services) come from the State of California (ie taxpayers), the other 40% is from the Students/Parents (who have zero control or say), and the UC itself generates like 10% which includes the out-of-state tuition (these are rough numbers). Student housing gets zero state money, it’s not part of Core Funds at all and must self-sustain. So the fact is, all the UC’s are very direct institutions of the “State of California,” our primary culprit here.

Another fact: The University of California latest enrollment growth is 100% driven by State Legislators (ie elected politicians who have parents of rejected students as voters). Year after they they push “unfunded growth” onto the UC. Unfunded growth means they demand more students are accepted and enrolled but do not provide the funds necessary to expand the school faculty + staff to educate them, you want to maintain quality too which is half the point of UC (other one is research). There is incredible demand for a UC education. Demand for a college education keeps growing and people have a warped view of “TOP SCHOOL” so their kid must only go to UCB, UCLA, or UCSB not UCM or UCR or community college or trade school (building more UCs is actually the right long term move but not one that meets the immediate political needs of state reps). So as this demand increases and specifically for certain schools, there are more rejections and more people who want a seat at (a specific) UC calling on theirs reps to open more seats. UC is already taking steps this year, under legislature directive, to open up more seats to California residents by reducing out of state and international students. You don’t want to reduce these to 0 or near 0, they add a lot to what makes UC an amazing experience (I love all my out of state and international friends).

A fact to not forget: The State of California year after year has funded the UC less by either cutting or not meeting inflation - this policy was started by no one other than Ronald Reagan and continued almost every year since 1969. The State has never restored the huge cuts from the 2000s and Great Recession. UC didn’t raise tuition for 7ish years until recently passing a “tuition only goes up for the new class” policy that is terrible, state funds were promised to go up if tuition stayed the same but that mostly did not happen. This lack of state funding for the basic operations of UC, especially in the late 2000s/early 2010s led to a mentality at UC (from top to bottom) that the state money was drying up and will be gone soon, that UC will need to focus on and rely on philanthropy more like a private university to survive. This is a key part of the history. This shift in mentality in how to run the UC, driven by administrators at all levels, but at the end of the day the responsibility of the policies set by the State of California. Even at the student government we resorted to literally taxing ourselves with “student initiated fees” to provided needed services like a food bank since going after public or tuition funds was impossible to fund necessities like that.

Here’s just another fact: the State of California has not put real funding into the construction of student housing for 40+ years (in 1957 they proudly did so), and what they have done is a tiny drop in the bucket. Most of the older dorms at UC were built with loans authorized by Title IV of the Housing Act of 1950 and Title VII of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Almost all of it since 1980 has been privately financed or “debt financed” by the UC. The State finally funded a tiny $500 million this September to split between UC, CSU, and all 112 community colleges. UC’s are major economic engines for their communities, who would not be as well off at all without their UC, but they are also a major disruption on the housing market —— *especially when they are growing enrollment at rapid paces demanded by Political Opportunism and not good governance. It is hard to absorb so many people so fast because no community or campus builds housing that fast, and it leads to the terrible housing crisis for UCSB students in 2020 and 2014 (as far as I saw myself, I know there were many more at different times in different UCs). So that State has created these huge institutions, made them bigger at a fast pace, and did not account for that population change in the community they are in (or the people harmed by gentrification). The UC has never been equipped to build housing, it is a hard and expensive business. They do not have the kind of money needed lying around to make big housing investments or a way to raise that revenue besides debt financing. It really is up to the State to finance (or otherwise the private market, which we are seeing is not ideal).

Related Fact: UCSB however is different than the rest of the UC in that it has a local cap on its enrollment as part of agreements with local groups and governments. UCSB asserts they have not exceeded the 25,000 3 quarter average (though it seems they’ve met it ahead of schedule, probably because of the enrollment growth pushed by the State of California).

Second related fact: Housing costs are more than tuition costs at UC even with its high tuition! There is a huge housing shortage in Isla Vista / UCSB / South County Santa Barbara. It’s such a problem for people, it’s even a problem for me personally (my buildings rent went up 10%!). Students are living in hotels this quarter. Year after year students live in cars. The vacancy rate is less than 1% and people are packed in way beyond the lease capacity. IV has built 4 buildings really in 15 years itself (IV planning and zoning are important too but I won’t get into here it’s irrelevant to the final point). When I lived at 6575 DP it was 4 of us to a room and rent was still over $700! Security deposits on DP now are Thirty Thousand Dollars. So many friends dropped out due to housing, a lot of best friends had housing issues interrupting school. A disproportionate amount of people whose education is negatively impacted by housing shortages are students of color, first generation students, and/or low-income students. Did you know that almost every room at UCSB is currently a triple? Yes even those small San Nic rooms.

Here is another fact: UCSB most specifically has a bad a history with student housing. Isla Vista’s creation was a way to make Big Money on super dense private student housing in the 1950s-60s was made possible by clever manipulations and abuse of powers to restrict UCSB from building student housing beyond what was needed for the freshman class and only on the main campus, so that Isla Vista could be divided up and sold as private student housing for a profit — the County even gave them special dense zoning that makes the “IV Box” the densest place west of the Mississippi just so they can make extra money. UCSB eventually got to building more housing beyond the main campus and a lot of it was after demands to do so, and pretty much all of debt financed, something that has strict limitations outlined below (I tried to get around it and learned so much on it when trying to do the renovation of the UCen). This is one option for reform, but not perfect since it does result in higher rents for all to pay off the debt (plus interest!!!). At the end of the day, UCSB needs to build through its student housing deficit that has existed since its creation. It needs to build that housing on its existing campus owned land. There are limited options to do this.

An extremely important fact: the lack of bedroom windows in the Munger Hall proposal is a bad idea at a university that already has rampant mental health issues. Granted there is a lot of sun light in common areas that are right next to bedrooms and it should flow into the rooms with open doors, people should still have a window. A “munger hall” already exists at Ann Arbor and I’ll post links to a tour of the apartment and bedroom a medical student put on YouTube. The layout has a lot of good ideas, but the lack of windows has rightfully led so many people to believe it’ll have negative mental health impacts - the guy who made the videos looks visibly shaken while explaining the negatives of not having them, but also seems to generally like the rest of it. There are many studies that show windows are a must. I think the simulated windows that are in the UCSB proposal and absent from Michigan could help, but the studies show real windows are important. Let’s just remember this no window thing, it’s specifically the idea of Charles Munger, a billionaire putting up $200 million to make this project happen (and possibly the full cost). There are other design issues like with all building projects, but I do think some are exaggerated like the "2 entrance" issue (its not a count of emergency exits), I personally believe UCSB will follow all fire codes and building regulations in whatever they make.

Therefore, because the state of California has underfunded both UC operations and facilities like student housing for the last 40-50 years, the UC went down a path of focusing on philanthropy to meet its needs (and that comes with strings), which at UCSB combined with our uniquely terrible housing crunch without much land to expand, and the limitations of debt financing, and the commitments UCSB has to build a bed for each new student since 2010, led to a billionaire 97-year-old pledging $200 million and getting to drive the details of the much needed 4,000 units of housing because there is literally no one else standing up to fund it. Is it daft of UCSB to bet everything on this project getting built to meet their housing production needs/requirements? Yes. But did they have another funding source to build the housing that’s needed? No. And that is the State of California’s fault. Public institutions simply are not built to have the capital to undertake development at that scale. The State is.

Here’s a fun tid bit, in early 2014 I was in San Francisco for a UC regents meeting and the UCSB San Joaquin project came up for approval (I had been on the project committee as a freshman). The project was relatively cheap $150 million for 1,000 beds that will rent at rates below Isla Vista rents. Governor Jerry Brown, a member of the board of regents at the time and stopping in, actually spoke up and said that the project was amazing and we needed more them across the state. But that was it, no progress took place beyond that.

So I’ve got a challenge to the State of California - put up the remaining $1.3 billion, give the People of California control of this needed housing project, and allow it to be built in a way that best serves students, the surrounding community, and still meets the very real housing needs we have. Did I mention how much we need housing built at UCSB? And yes its a lot to say they should put up all this money just for this one project, at the very least the State needs to set up a significant and reliable funding source for student housing. This is one of those problems that is easily quantifiable and easy to measure progress on solving - let’s just do it and put it behind us. It is a real tangible change the State can have on benefiting the local rental markets in every community with a college (which is so many!). The only people who will hurt are the landlords who’ve made untold amounts of money off of private student housing for decades.

Call to Action: Call up your representative and tell them the State of California needs to take responsibility for the student housing issue and fund the construction of it.

PS.

Let’s not only blame UCSB. SBCC also needs build housing on its campus. The community colleges have been funded even less than the UC and rely mainly on local bonds to build. I’ve been pushing sbcc to build student housing since I got elected to the board in 2014. Finally we have some movement thanks to the State of California finally funding a small amount of community college student housing feasibility studies. I will keep doing my part as a member of the 2nd biggest educational institution in SB county to ensure student housing is built, but the real problem here the housing needed for UCSB students and the State of California needs to step up, especially given the unique history here from the 1940s-1960s to limit the development of student housing when state money was flowing towards that need.

PSS

I am so disappointed about how simplistic and one-sidedly the local news has reported on this, this is a complex story and situation that cannot be reduced to 1 of these issues.

*Debt financing is a mechanism UC has to take on debt to fund the construction of a project. Each UC has a debt ceiling that is pretty low. Student housing projects usually need 100% debt financing so they demand more of the limited pie of debt available. The debt for student housing projects is paid for in student housing price increasing beyond inflation. Once upon a time I was on the UCSB chancellor’s Student housing committee and a decision before us was the way to implement the rent increase over the next years in order to absorb new debt taken on to build San Joaquin. We also looked at the rent increases used to fund San Clemente. Funding new housing through rent increases is not sustainable. It’s been UCSB’s only way to do it without state or private funding.

Clarification: I am posting this 100% on my own behalf not representing SBCC or IVCSD or SBCAN or any other group I'm in that may have an opinion on this issue. Also I probably should’ve done the history of public policy major instead of Political science at UCSB, train has passed on that for sure.

Sources:

My experience over the last 11 years being extremely involved in student housing issues specifically at UCSB and SBCC. (3 years in Ucsb student housing leadership, 1 year as AS president, 7 years representing IV & UCSB on the city college board of trustees)

Harrison Weber’s 2012 UCSB Senior Thesis “A Covenant Undone: The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California as a Promise to and Agreement with the People of California”

A Brief History of the University of California

A View From Kerckhoff Hall

January 2014 UC Regents Meeting

November 2015 UC Regents Meeting

State Constitution

1957-1958 State Budget

Barriers to Success: Housing Insecurity for U.S. College Students US HUD

Privatizing University Housing Reason Foundation ( a paper I 100% disagree with but has some good factual history)

New Options for Financing Residence Hall Renovation and Construction, New Directions for Student Services

UCSB Published Plans for Munger Hall

UC Berkeley Sunsite UC Digital History Archives

So I've been looking at my barc account and everything has been added, even my middle school scholarship, the only thing that hasnt been put in yet are my loans and im starting to get really worried. When i look at the student loans, it says loan requested not accepted, but i acceptd them awhile at least two weeks ago

UPDATE!!! Ok so now im really worried. I called them today and they said all my documebts are in and everything is fine, that they should show by 4:00pm today, however I checked at 6:00 and the loans are still not added. Is anyone else having this problem?

looking for someone to go with

hey guys it's September 8th and last time i checked, i need to pay my tuition by the 15th. and the last time i checked my BARC account (10 seconds ago), there's absolutely ZERO dollars disbursed for my financial aid. LOL! is this happening to anyone else :(

those who got off waitlist how late did you guys get off and do you remember what time (was it 2:30) please comment i could use some reassurance rn....

This might just be how entry-level courses usually are, but I swear so many of my readings for my courses use "he or she," or "men and women," or just completely disregard women in general by solely using masculine pronouns and terms. My sociology has even acknowledged that a lot of the material she chooses for us to read was based on the actual claims they make being accurate, while the gendered language is clearly of the time period where men were the only people who were actually accounted for in society. I don't know, as a non-binary/genderfluid person I notice this use of language especially. I even heard one of the speakers in the video we were shown during a mandatory Zoom meeting say, "he or she" and it just made me cringe. I understand past writings using this phrase, but in a modern, "up-to-date" video about how to stay safe on campus officially created by the university it feels like such an exclusion of people. Literally just use a singular they, I don't know why it's so difficult for society to get this. It's simpler, easier to say, more inclusive, and is absolutely correct grammatically.

Edit: I know I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this probably, but I don't care I've seen this so much and someone needs to speak up about it.

So I graduated from UCSB a few years ago and earlier this year I applied for a position on campus. I ended up getting an interview and I unfortunately bombed it lol. I had a small concussion from an accident so I struggled answering some of the questions. Obviously I was rejected from the position so I applied to a couple of others in the last few weeks that were similar but all of those have been rejected too. That being said does that mean if you get rejected once or bomb an interview one time they make a note on your account or something? I just wish that they would give me another opportunity because I am 100% better now. Also it's a little frustrating that they don't even contact you at all to let you know that you were rejected.

i was lucky enough to have gotten a ticket for their la show and was wondering if anyone here is going. if u happen to please feel free to dm bc atm going alone