Sounds like a dream school! Try this site for a good place to start narrowing your search:California Colleges. For CA State Universities, here is a Campus Map of schools. You'll see a number of them are near the beach. (The names are hot links to the more info.) Add UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and a couple in San Diego as more colleges that near the beach! There are just too many choices. Try the search tools and see if you can narrow down your list by major.