I was accepted to UCSB for Economics.
It depends on what courses you got a lot of C’s in. Since you were lost & didn’t know what you wanted to do yet, hopefully, those courses were not your Econ major prerequisites.
My UCSB representative who visited our school said UCSB makes the admissions decision for Econ based on the 4 prerequisites: Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Macroeconomics, and Microeconomics. They are very important to UCSB. You really need A’s in those 4 courses. Getting a B in one of them will be fine but there will most likely be other students who got A’s in all 4 and therefore stand out.
You can get some C’s in the GE courses but UCSB also gives weight to an upward trend in grades. Remember, UCSB’s minimum overall GPA is 3.0 so you gotta have at least that to be accepted.
Focus on those 4 prerequisites I listed above though.