Why might the collector-emitter voltage for this transistor be so high?
The ULN2003A is a Darlington array, made up of Darlington pairs. The Darlington pair has higher current gain than an individual bipolar transistor. The side effects include a higher \$V_{be}\$ (in common emitter configuration, it will appear as about two diode drops instead of one) and \$V_{ce}\$ (\$V_{be}\$ of one transistor, plus \$V_{ce}\$ of the other).