University of California Santa Barbara
Quick Facts

• University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), College of Engineering was ranked #1 in the September 2006 edition of The Princeton Review’s Top 20 Graduate Engineering Programs.
• UCSB's Shuji Nakamura received the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize, the world’s biggest technology award, for his invention of revolutionary new light sources: blue, green, and white light-emitting diodes and the blue laser diode.
• Researchers from UCSB and Intel Corporation built the world’s first electrically powered Hybrid Silicon Laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes. This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers.
• UCSB College of Engineering is ranked #2 nationally in the number of faculty elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.
• Four teaching faculty in Engineering and the Sciences have won the Nobel Prize in the last seven years (five university-wide), for their landmark research in chemistry, physics, and economics.
• One of only 62 research-intensive institutions elected to membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities, this vibrant, energetic campus now ranks among the leaders in higher education in the United States and Canada.
• UCSB is home to eleven national centers and institutes, including eight sponsored by National Science Foundation, one of the most prestigious recognitions of academic quality.
• The California NanoSystems Institute, a research partnership between UCSB and UCLA, receives $100 million in state funds, which will be matched two-to-one by private industry. The institutes are expected to produce scientific advances in fields critical to the future of California’s economy.
• U.S. News and World Report's guide, "America's Best Colleges," the most widely read college guide in the country, ranks UCSB the 13th best public university in the nation.
• UCSB has been named one of the "hottest" colleges in the nation twice in the past five years by Newsweek magazine's guide to America's best colleges.
• Demand for admission to UCSB continues to be intense and has received a record 47,893 applications to the campus for Fall 2006, more than double a decade ago. Among the applicants, 12,033 had a high school GPA of 4.0 or higher.