University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Courses and Fees 2025

• The difficulty of my curriculum is medium.
• My curriculum has a lot of theory and applications as it is an engineering degree.
• A student takes three courses per quarter. If the course is in-person, then there are 3 hours of class time per week for 10 weeks.

• The fees are based on in-state and out-of-state tuition. If a person proves residency in their current state, then they pay in-state tuition.
• In-state tuition is cheaper. A majority of the tuition is academics. Students may have to take a college provided health insurance plan or they can waive it. Having the college health insurance costs more.
• Lastly, housing is also part of tuition if a student has on-campus housing. If students live in dorms, they have to also pay for a meal plan. The meal plans and rents are shown on the UCSC website.
• Students pay the academic tuition every quarter. Housing tuition can be paid monthly or every quarter. The student gets to choose. My current housing is $1400 montly. The school has good transportation so it is easy to travel of campus.
   

• It really depends upon the courses you take—and even within that, the specialisation that you want to carry out. For my specialisation (Electrical and Electronics Engineering), if you choose the robotics specialisation, there are a lot of hands-on courses where you work on hardware. My specialisation is controls, which is somewhat more theoretical.
• Don't really know a lot of negative aspects; on the positive side, the courses are detailed and prepare you fairly well for a role in industry/research.

• The PhD program is fully funded and I get an approx. ~$2800 per month, post taxes.
• My rent is around $1400 and my other expenses (including stuff such as food/transportation) are around $800-1000.
• In case you own a car, you're looking at additional expenses, including at least $250 per month in insurance, parking, and licensing, apart from the cost of buying a car (obviously!). But you don't necessarily need a car, since the public transportation in Santa Cruz and its connectivity via public transport to the Bay Area is fairly decent.

It's alright. I like that they still kept the physics series in the computer engineering curriculum because last year they remove it from the computer science one and I was worried they would do the same force

There are fees for many things. We have access to free tutoring for many courses and we have TAs for almost all classes. For some classes with labs, we have to pay a $25 fee for materials