I fell in love with Santa Barbara City College students after I had begun the Ambassador Program at a property in Isla Vista three years ago. This was a program where — if you had a 3.0 GPA or better and volunteered for 60 or more hours of local community work inside Isla Vista — I would give the student a 20 percent discount in rent, about $160 per month. In our first year we had over140 Ambassadors and 10 board members; eight of these board members turned out to be SBCC students.
At first, I was skeptical because I had always doubted the sincerity of City College students living in I.V. My logic, as most landlords', was why would a CC student want to live 12 miles from their campus unless it was for the I.V. party scene? In short, I was very surprised by how dedicated the CC students were to the Ambassador Program. Perhaps they needed the discount more than most of the UCSB students, but that endeared us even more to the SBCC students. My wife and I became close to many of our students in the program, and it became obvious to both of us that most of the CC students only lived in Isla Vista because of no available downtown rentals close to their campus.
It also became obvious that SBCC students are somewhat outcasts in Isla Vista, and by this I mean that unless you are a UCSB student, you cannot use any of the facilities such as the gym, swimming pools, libraries, study halls, tennis courts, etc. But the biggest problem in our minds was the commute to SBCC! In our minds, CC students are practically set up for failure if they live in Isla Vista. Imagine having an 18- to 21-year-old student away from their home for the very first time having to get out the door at 7:30 a.m. to be in a 9 a.m. class, with the odds that same student's next class starts several hours later — thus having really no choice but to hang around campus for hours until their next class begins because it makes no sense to travel the 12 miles back to I.V. by bus and then back again to SBCC. It's absolutely absurd! But this is now the reality for SBCC students living in Isla Vista.