For the sixth year running, UC Santa Barbara has set a record for the number of first-year and transfer applicants seeking admission to the campus, and the university is planning to house more of them this fall.

In fact, the University of California system as a whole broke records, attracting 193,873 applications — 158,146 freshmen (up 6.5 percent) and 35,727 transfer students (up 2.6 percent) — with increases seen on all nine campuses.






This week, UCSB announced it received 85,208 applications for undergraduate admission for fall 2015 — 5 percent more than last year.

First-year students made up 70,532 of the aspiring Gauchos, with 14,676 seeking to transfer.

UCSB is still calculating its enrollment goals for 2015-16, according to Admissions Director Lisa Przekop, but the school sent acceptance letters to 24,127 high school seniors last spring.

She pointed out that UCSB has seen gains in enrollment every year since 1993 except for 2009, when applications dipped slightly.

“Enrollment is based on how many spaces we determine will be available, taking into consideration the number of students who will be graduating in June,” Przekop said. “We also take into consideration how many freshmen versus transfer, and the number of graduate students.” 

UCSB typically houses about 95 percent of freshmen and an unknown number of new transfer students, university spokesman George Foulsham said.

More than 52,000 applications were from soon-to-be college freshmen living in California, which was a 2.2 percent increase from last year. 

Nearly 90 percent of 14,676 transfer applicants were enrolled in community colleges within the state.

So far, 1,440 applicants have been recorded as attending high school or community college in Santa Barbara County, Przekop said, and out-of-state student applications increased 16.3 percent to 7,490.

Przekop said most of UCSB’s projected growth over the next five years will be at the graduate level — a key part of housing goals outlined in the university’s Long Range Development Plan approved late last year.

The long-range plan aims to accommodate academic program changes and an influx of students projected through 2025. Based on a 1 percent annual enrollment increase, that’s 250 new students a year and 5,000 total, and the university wants space to house them all.

The Sierra Madre student apartment complex, under construction on Storke Road, will be ready for occupancy in fall 2015. The development will house 515 students in 115 three-bedroom, two-bedroom and one-bedroom apartments, and 36 units will be leased as single residences to UCSB student, faculty and staff families.

Two other housing developments — the San Joaquin Apartments and Mesa Verde — are also in the works, the first of which would be finished by fall 2016.

UCSB attributed application increases to “unparalleled” learning opportunities for undergraduate students, highlighting the fact 37 percent of freshman applicants had a high-school GPA of 4.0 or higher — the most competitive applicant pool in university history.

The admissions director said besides visiting schools and college fairs, UCSB has been a leader in providing online one-on-one advising for community college students via Skype and Adobe Connect as part of its recruitment efforts.

— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.