<p>CCCO, Barnard only offers need-based aid – so there is no such thing as a “scholarship opportunity”.</p>
<p>Apparently the family has at least $150K of assets available to fund college, but the father is only willing to pay about $100K for the undergraduate education. So it’s pretty unlikely that they will be offered more in need-based aid.</p>
<p>At this point the OP simply can’t afford Barnard. Even if she wanted to borrow, as an undergrad she would not be able to get the loans needed, unless her parents cosigned -which isn’t a good option in any case.</p>
<p>So Barnard is the applicant’s top choice, but her father has taken it off the table, and she will be attending a UC campus.</p>
<p>She will do fine. Her experience will be different than if she could attend Barnard, but she will do fine. Any UC campus will offer her plenty of opportunities.</p>
<p>She wants to go to grad school, either MBA or law. Maybe her parents are exercising some restraint right now in the expectation that they can help her later on. We don’t know. But I do know that if she spends 4 years at UCSB and has good grades and a strong LSAT score, she can apply to and have reasonable chances of acceptance at any law school in the country.</p>
<p>The UC’s have plenty of smaller classes and professor-taught classes – the big lectures are mostly in the introductory level courses, particularly in the sciences. The OP will probably not be taking those courses, and she very likely has AP credits that will enable to her to jump past intro level classes in many courses. For example, when I was at a UC, I signed up for upper division history classes that interested me, but never took any lower division classes. One of my classes had 6 students, all working very closely the professor. I’m 60 years old but I still remember that class, because the prof was having us all do research from primary source material – and it was pretty cool. </p>
<p>When my daughter was at Barnard, she had some large classes and she had to work with TA’s. She had TAs for her foreign language sections, a TA for her stats class, and TA’s leading discussion sessions for some of her larger classes. </p>
<p>There is also one area where Santa Barbara is hands down better than Barnard: the weather. (Perhaps that will bring a smile to her face if there are times she feels wistful about the east coast LAC her parents wouldn’t finance). </p>