•Bureaucracy + inefficiency in school offices. Good luck getting anything processed on time. Good luck interacting with SOAR if you're in a campus organization trying to organize an event or activity. Good luck trying to reserve a room for any larger than 10 people. Transcript requests are a pain. Financial aid office routinely fucks up. Some department open at 10am, take an hour for lunch, and close at 3pm. All of these things are fine at first, and then seem massively frustrating over time.
•This school is overcrowded. All rooms on campus are now triples. All lounges are now quads. You'll pay something around $1671 a month, including a meal plan, to live on campus. It's cheaper to live off-campus but the housing market is fucked with the influx of students. Landlords can charge anything as long as it's marginally cheaper than campus. Santa Cruz landlords are, by and far, awful to deal with. Everyone's heard horror stories of uninhabitable houses being rented to students who have nowhere else to go. Buses are routinely packed. I've seen up to 37 people in a 25 max-capacity room for section. Libraries are usually crowded, especially peaks during midterms and finals.
•Few eating options on campus currently, aside from dining halls. By the end of the year we should have something in the quarry but right now it's a clusterfuck of construction. Hard to find a place to hang out at night besides a library or your room.
•When classes are good, they're good. When classes are bad, you'll regret it for an entire quarter. Many professors teach because it's part of their contract and deliver awful lectures (often with mandatory attendance) and don't really want to be there. It's this way with GE classes, but also upper-divisions depending on your major.
•This area will nickel-and-dime you at every opportunity. In the literal sense, parking is massively expensive at UCSC and you'll pay $3 to park for 2 hours at any metered spot. TAPS will sell you an R-permit, good for use in remote lots, and neglect to tell you that all lots except East Remote (feat. regular break-ins, minimal patrols, and is poorly lit at night) fill up after 8am because people who live on campus park their cars in lots close to their residential colleges. On non-parking notes, the cost of living is quite high here and you'll be reminded of that fact everyday.
TL;DR: If this school weren't so beautiful, and weed wasn't as good and widely available as it is, everyone would be pissed.