The U.S. News and World Report's guide, "America's Best Colleges," the most widely read college guide in the country, has named UC Santa Barbara as the 13th best public university in the nation. The magazine provides a directory to 1,400 universities and ranks them on such criteria as academic reputation, student-to-faculty ratio, spending on students, and test scores.

The University of California, Santa Barbara, a major research institution which is, at its core, an outstanding undergraduate university.

Away from urban pressures, yet deeply involved in the intellectual and cultural issues of our time, it is a place where learning and living are as natural as the Santa Barbara coastline and the nearby Santa Ynez Mountains. For all its natural beauty, however, UCSB's uniqueness lies elsewhere. It is found in its superb learning environ-ment, in the relaxed relationship between faculty and students, and, above all, in a deep-rooted commitment of professors to ensuring that all students reach their fullest po-tential.

In part, the easy, informal relationships between faculty and students reflect UCSB's relative youth. Unlike older institutions, UCSB has been able to explore less tradition- bound approaches to education. A University of Cali-fornia campus since 1944, it stresses close collaboration not only between students and teachers, but also across academic lines. You'll find chemists working alongside physicists, linguists collaborating with computer experts. To foster such cooperative scholarship, which may well be a model for the university of the 21st century, the Na-tional Science Foundation has established seven interdisciplinary research centers at UCSB.