100% agreed - and you can say that about any school - even those at the tippy top of the party school list. That was my experience at Syracuse, my wife’s at Arizona, and both my kids at Alabama and Charleston.
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We took S24 to MIT school tour during family vacation when he was at elementary school. The tour guide kept talking about different engineering project and they really interested him. He never told us, but ever since then MIT became his dream school. Engineering became his dream major.
Afterward, he worked hard in middle school and high school and got all As. At the end, he got rejected by MIT like everybody else. But he got accepted to UCD Aerospace Engineering. UC Davis is not MIT, but he still love his freshman year there. Without MIT as dream school, he may not get even this far. Therefore, I don’t see dream school is a bad idea, as long as the kid can separate dream from reality.
Kids need to be adults one day. They need to learn settling for reality. I had dream to be CEO one day, but I am OK to be senior manager 
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Party school? I guess if you want to find one, they are there in fraternities, but I have a kid there and he has never seen or attended one. He is a STEM kid and all his roommates are engineers. It’s a very hard school depending on majors. They go out to the beach sometimes or movies, but unless you are in a fraternity, you aren’t partying there. Maybe it’s different for girls?
A classical “party school” (Animal House style) would be easy to get into, and not require much work. UCLA is definitely not that type of school.
However UCLA do select for leadership-related ECs, probably more so than UCB. So there are lots of outgoing kids, and some prestigious clubs like SAA are very social and organize lots of trips (skiing, Vegas etc) and activities, some for the whole student body, but others just for club members.
My kids didn’t have “dream” schools or did they 
. There was one particular school that didn’t work out and he was pretty silent the whole day. He didn’t know I knew of the release. That called for Pizza and sundaes for dessert.
Sounds silly but it does ease the pain. We never talked about it either. Just didn’t need to.
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My S24 did become very fond of one school after visiting–it was almost his ED2 school, but he decided to stick with RD. He was clearly very nervous when that one was about to release, and very relieved when he was admitted. And he is now there, in fact, although he did visit a couple other places post-offers to make sure.
Anyway, I also don’t know if that counts as a dream school per se, particularly since it wasn’t a school he really had on his radar until I suggested a visit. But for sure I would not suggest we try to prevent kids from forming some relative preferences during the search process, as that would be impossible.
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My youngest had a dream school. We all made sure to build up all the other schools and also reinforce that no school is perfect. Although I’m not a fan of ED, because I knew my daughter had a clear favorite and we were able and willing to pay for it, we let her ED. She got in but I think she would have been okay had it not worked out. She has had a great Freshmen year but we were right in telling her that no school is perfect.
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One of the writers of Animal House based some of the story on his experiences at Dartmouth, which is not easy to get into.
Of course, UCLA is very different from Dartmouth.
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Animal House was released in 1978, when UCLA had an admission rate of at least 74% (the 1980 figure). It would certainly have qualified as a party school back then (it still was when our friends attended in the mid 1980s).
And it was based on Belushi’s experiences at college in the 1960s, when I expect Dartmouth’s admission rate was similarly high.
Animal House co-writer Chris Miller was the one who was actually in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity at Dartmouth. He apparently graduated in 1963, which means this Life Magazine article from 1960 is probably appropriate:
Per that description, Dartmouth was interested in a “solid student and all-around boy”. In terms of numbers, it apparently was getting around 4000 applicants for 800 slots. I am not sure what the yields were back then. The reported mean SAT scores were V 623 M 655. In that era, the average for all test-takers was like V 475 M 495 (give or take).
I would suggest what this is implying is that even among the more academically competitive applicants at a given time, there is always a subpopulation looking for a combination of a solid education and a lot of social fun.
And at least anecdotally, there are kids I know who see UCLA that way–very solid educationally, but can also be a lot of fun. I don’t have any personal experiences to evaluate that view, but I definitely don’t think there is anything wrong with that mindset.
Indeed, in some ways my S24 picked his college (WashU) for similar reasons. And to sort of come full circle, another co-writer of Animal House, Harold Ramis, went to WashU.
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It was simply a comment that UCLA was not a party school whereas UCSB is.
Yes, that’s UCSB’s reputation - but they have tons of non partiers. And UCLA has tons of partiers (and non partiers). Both are A+ through Niche and both have historically placed on lists.
Both have the location thing going - but yes UCSB more beachy, laid back - whereas UCLA, Hollywood, the Beach, Beverly Hills and then some.
I was simply noting that if the student is avoiding UCSB due to parties, then they should UCLA too.
They can find both scenarios at both - and frankly, if you did a venn diagram, many of the kids would overlap in the middle academically.
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