UCSB Sociology Graduate Program
General Information


Campus and Community:

The University of California, Santa Barbara campus is situated on an 989-acre promontory on the Pacific coast. The main campus is bordered on two sides by the ocean and on the third by the community of Isla Vista. On the fourth side, the campus faces the Santa Ynez mountain range across Goleta Valley. The main campus contains the majority of the 300 buildings that house the university. The outlying Storke campus includes playing fields and a family student housing complex. The west campus, which is largely undeveloped, contains an ecologically significant expanse of dunes that has been set aside as a natural preserve.

While UCSB's physical environment is stunning, it is the conjunction of the natural environment and the learning environment that makes the campus unique. With about 19,000 students, 17,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduates, and 900 faculty members, UCSB is large enough to offer the educational resources and research facilities of a world-class institution, but small enough to foster close relationships among faculty and students. The campus is home to seven national research centers and two professional schools, and has received a prestigious Research I ranking as one of American's top institutions by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nearly half of UCSB's academic departments and programs are ranked among the top 20 in the U.S. Because of these rankings and other indicators of academic excellence, UCSB is an elected member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), placing it among 62 leading institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and Canada.

Department:

The University of California, Santa Barbara, invites applications for the MA/PhD program in sociology. The Department of Sociology stresses diversity and innovation in its approach to research and learning. Consisting of 30 faculty, 95 graduate students, and 1000 undergraduate sociology majors, the department seeks to be a center of rigorous, sophisticated, and inspired searches for knowledge of social life.

Our faculty members are among the best in the nation in the areas of economy and society, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, feminist studies, global studies, race and ethnicity, sociology of culture, social movements, organizations, stratification, political sociology, urban sociology, law and social control, religion and society, population and environment, networks, quantitative and qualitative methods, and sociological theory.

Research conducted by our faculty and students is at the cutting edge in many areas of the discipline. Because our graduates have been well trained and have learned to work at the 'frontiers' of social research, they have secured a wide variety of significant professional positions throughout the country and around the world.