Help me decide on UCSC vs SJSU

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1

I’m a high school senior in the SF bay area and will be an undergrad Engineering freshman this fall. Among my accepts I have SJSU and UCSC, and would like your inputs to decide.

  • I visited both SJSU and UCSC campuses and their Engineering schools. Liked the industry proximity of SJSU and greener lush campus of UCSC, but the Eng depts and their facilities seemed comparable.
  • Both seem to offer flexibility in major switch (right now I have EE in SJSU and CE in UCSC), and claim to offer hands-on, project or research based opportunities. I’m a hands-on person so prefer such opportunities
  • SJSU claimed 60% of their Eng students get internships and claim strong tie-ups with silicon valley companies for job opportunities. UCSC did not share any such stats, and their prof claimed they have strong industry partnerships and implied their research projects are a level deeper vs. state universities
  • My parents have decent income and savings, and luckily will support my tuition. They have told me to really weigh other factors and not base my decision on the cost difference ($15k) between UCSC and SJSU.
  • I realize SJSU is more of a commuter campus, but their dorm seemed nice and having 5000 students residing there seemed like a community. I imagine UCSC student life might be better due to most of them being residential.

Thank you all for your inputs.

2

What do you want to study?

SJSU is ABET accredited in Aero, Biomedical, Chem, Civil, Computer, Electrical, Industrial, Materials, Mechanical and Software.

UCSC is ABET accredited in Electrical.

Unless I was majoring in EE, I wouldn’t consider UCSC. I don’t think the schools are comparable at all. As it is, they only offer bimolecular, CE, and ECE. I’m a fan of having ABET accreditation. It seems a risky play to me unless you’re sure what you want.

Given 50% of kids don’t finish in engineering, you might want to ensure the school has an easy path to other majors and majors that interest you.

Here’s career data - for 2025, it doesn’t show when the capture, but 244 had jobs, 68 were still looking and 46 in grad school. This is SJSU. The knowledge rate was 36% - so they have data on about 1/3 of kids. The average salary was $79.5K and median was $81K. For EE, was $108K with 26 working, 7 in school and 5 working. They show only 57% with an internship - which seems low to me. For grad school, they had students in EE at SJSU, Stanford and UCLA.

Santa Cruz doesn’t seem to have a robust dashboard - it shows 62 in engineering but says its back to 2016. I don’t see a way to choose just 2025.

Bottom line - if you might change your engineering major to another discipline, I wouldn’t even consider UCSC. So I’d pick San Jose State.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

SJSU Career Center - FDS Dashboard › Career Outcomes

First Destination Survey – Institutional Research, Analytics, and Planning Support

2 Likes
3

San Jose has more to offer with engineering , but you’ll have to decide whether that’s more important to you or whether the urban versus rural campus makes it big enough difference for you.

4

Are you guaranteed a room in the dorms at SJSU?
What alternate majors would you consider at UCSC?