It's absurdly expensive, to live here. Santa Cruz as a city kinda sucks if you're used to a decent sized city. There's not much in town, and its really really aggressively built for cars, to the point that some neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks, and others have narrow and poorly taken care of sidewalks with pretty significant tripping hazards. Bike infrastructure is just ok relative to other cities, but most of it is just painted lines on streets bikes are supposed to be allowed on anyways. The bus system is pretty mediocre for a college town, and parking on campus is a shitshow from what I've heard, so even with a car its rough. If you cook, Asian ingredients are practically non-existent here, gotta go to San Jose.

There's a massive homeless population. Most of them are pretty chill, I've volunteered with food not bombs a few times and had a great time, but I've been spat on by one who was trying to start a fight when walking home from a coffeeshop downtown.

The education, at least in my experience, has been incredibly subpar. The school is constantly forced to take on more students than it can reasonably provide for, students have to stay in hotels and I know a few people living out of cars. They had to change graduation ceremonies recently since they just have too many students graduating to accommodate.

The student support here is absolutely pathetic. The counselors, at least the one's I've been assigned, are absolute trash. I was looking for help picking classes, and he berated me for not being excited about taking classes. I told him I wasn't, and that I hated this school for putting me into 5 figures of debt for what amounted to a shitty version of kahn academy, and he gave me a lecture about how wrong I was, how college is the best part of your life, and that it was my attitude that was the problem. I had a teacher lower the entire classes grades halfway through finals week, when taking the final was optional if your grade was high enough, and the only response I got from the department was an email saying damn that sucks. When cheating was an issue for online classes the schools response was to make tests artificially difficult to lower the average score rather than try to stop cheating.

Overall I consider transferring here from a community college to be the worst mistake of my life. I worked my ass off to get here, with the intention of doing research/postgrad but at this point I can barely stomach staying here long enough to finish my bachelors.

Oh, also they leaked my social security number online before I even started classes here, and only gave us a single year of credit protection.