by our College Data Analytics Team
College Factual analyzes over 2,000 colleges and universities in its annual rankings and ranks them in a variety of ways, including most diverse, best overall quality, best for non-traditional students, and much more.
Santa Barbara City College was awarded 7 badges in the 2025 rankings. The highest ranked major at the school is health & medical administrative services.
Explore the best ranked schools for the programs you are most interested in.
College Factual ranked SBCC as #289 out of 2,152 colleges and universities in the country on its 2025 Best Colleges list. This puts it in the top 20% of all schools in the nation. This is an improvement over the previous year, when SBCC held the #837 spot on the Best Overall Colleges list.
SBCC also holds the #42 spot on the Best Colleges in California ranking.
If you are worried about getting into Santa Barbara City College, don't be. The school has a liberal open admissions policy, which means you only need to meet basic requirements in order to be admitted. Still, be sure to submit a complete application and provide any other requested materials.
At Santa Barbara City College, the student to faculty ratio is 37 to 1. Compared to the national average of 15 to 1, this is somewhat high. This could mean that class sizes may be larger than they are at other colleges or universities or that professors may be required to teach more classes.
Another measure that is often used to estimate how much access students will have to their professors is how many faculty members are full-time. The idea here is that part-time faculty tend to spend less time on campus, so they may not be as available to students as full-timers.
The full-time faculty percentage at Santa Barbara City College is 46%. This is comparable to the national average of 47%.
The freshmen retention rate tells us what percentage of first-year, full-time students choose to continue on to their sophomore year at a particular school. The rate at Santa Barbara City College is 68%, which is about average when compared to the national rate of 68%.
During the 2017-2018 academic year, there were 12,525 undergraduates at SBCC with 5,400 being full-time and 7,125 being part-time.
| $0-30 K | $30K-48K | $48-75 | $75-110K | $110K + |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $9,780 | $10,388 | $12,867 | $15,906 | $16,804 |
The net price is calculated by adding tuition, room, board and other costs and subtracting financial aid.Note that the net price is typically less than the published for a school. For more information on the sticker price of SBCC, see our tuition and fees and room and board pages.
It's not uncommon for college students to take out loans to pay for school. In fact, almost 66% of students nationwide depend at least partially on loans. At SBCC, approximately 5% of students took out student loans averaging $5,397 a year. That adds up to $21,588 over four years for those students.
Get more details about paying for Santa Barbara City College.
See which majors at Santa Barbara City College make the most money.
Get more details about the location of Santa Barbara City College.
Contact details for SBCC are given below.
| Contact Details | |
|---|---|
| Address: | 721 Cliff Drive, Santa Barbara, CA 93109-2394 |
| Phone: | 805-965-0581 |
| Website: | www.sbcc.edu/ |
| Most Popular Majors | Bachelor’s Degrees | Average Salary of Graduates |
|---|---|---|
| Liberal Arts General Studies | 1,745 | NA |
| Biological & Physical Science | 389 | NA |
| Economics | 144 | NA |
| Business Support & Assistant Services | 132 | NA |
| General Psychology | 132 | NA |
| Business Administration & Management | 120 | NA |
| Health & Medical Administrative Services | 119 | NA |
| Nursing | 77 | NA |
| Sociology | 76 | NA |
| Other Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies | 70 | NA |
Online learning is becoming popular at even the oldest colleges and universities in the United States. Not only are online classes great for returning adults with busy schedules, they are also frequented by a growing number of traditional students.
In 2022-2023, 9,099 students took at least one online class at Santa Barbara City College. This is a decrease from the 10,253 students who took online classes the previous year.
| Year | Took at Least One Online Class | Took All Classes Online |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-2023 | 9,099 | 4,199 |
| 2021-2022 | 10,253 | 5,498 |
| 2020-2021 | 7,380 | 2,564 |
| 2018-2019 | 5,676 | 2,353 |
Learn more about online learning at Santa Barbara City College.
Footnotes
*The racial-ethnic minorities count is calculated by taking the total number of students and subtracting white students, international students, and students whose race/ethnicity was unknown. This number is then divided by the total number of students at the school to obtain the racial-ethnic minorities percentage.
References
More about our data sources and methodologies.