UCSC sees record applications and admission offers but expects enrollment to remain flat

UC Santa Cruz’s applications and offer letters for the upcoming academic year reached record highs — again — but officials don’t expect overall enrollment numbers to increase significantly from last year. 

Preliminary data from UCSC shows that the university received 83,915 applications, about 5% more than the 79,900 it received last year. UCSC has so far offered admission to 43,700 potential first-year students, up a little more than 1% over last year’s 43,159 offers.

Once all final decisions have been made by students and their families, the university expects just 4,700 of those first-year students and about 1,250 transfer students will enroll in the fall. Total 2024-25 undergraduate enrollment is expected to reach about 17,795 – similar to last year’s figures.

UCSC extends a large number of offers for a variety of reasons during a typical year, according to Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management Michelle Whittingham. For example, some students are likely getting multiple offers from other UCs, including those who offer multi-year housing guarantees. UCSC only guarantees housing to first-years because of its limited on-campus housing supply. 

In addition, all 10 University of California campuses have signed a four-year compact with the state to increase the number of California residents accepted into the UC system by 8,000 by 2027. The compact requires that 15% of the growth occur at the San Diego, Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses with the rest at the remaining six campuses, including UCSC. This upcoming year, the state is requiring that UCSC add 471 additional California students to its total undergraduate enrollment.

“At Santa Cruz, we’ve really appreciated that we’ve had one of the smaller expected increases  across the system because of our capacity constraints,” Whittingham said. 

She described the admissions process – how extending 43,700 offers to first-years ultimately translates into just 4,700 enrolled students – as an art. This year, however, schools across the country were thrown a curveball by glitches with federal student aid forms. 

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), run by the U.S. Department of Education, rolled out this year with glitches that made it much more difficult for students with mixed-immigration status to submit forms. A student with mixed immigration status has one or multiple parents who don’t have a social security number. 

The number of high school students nationally who completed their FAFSA forms this year is 29% lower than this same time last year, according to the National College Attainment Network. 

Federal, state and higher education officials have been working to remedy the glitches. In the meantime many universities, like the UCs, extended their deadlines to accept or decline offers from May 1 to May 15 to allow students to first confirm that they will be able to receive federal student aid. 

Whittingham said while she doesn’t think the FAFSA glitches will have a major impact on UCSC’s enrollment, the number of low-income students who have accepted offers is lower than university officials expected at this stage of the process. 

She said in prior years, at this point, the university has similar numbers of students in different income levels who had accepted offers. Whittingham said financial aid offers are expected to be sent to students Thursday, and by Monday, they’ll see a higher number of low-income students who’ve accepted offers. 

“Now you’re seeing a higher proportion of the high-income or no income reported [students]” she said. “There’s still a lot of students in the middle to low-income bands, but I have a hunch – we’re tracking that carefully – and when we see those award offers go out probably next Monday, I think that will start looking very similar to prior years.”

The university started giving out some acceptance letters in February and the majority went out March 15. Since then, a total of 1,848 California first-year students have accepted offers, in addition to 330 out-of-state and international students and more than 450 transfer students. 

“We’re where we think we should be,” said Whittingham, adding that university officials  are expecting a lot of acceptances to come in the final week leading up to the May 15 deadline. 

She said the university will continue to offer all first-year students one year of on-campus housing. 

In the fall, the campus expects its total on-campus housing capacity to be 9,434, which includes undergraduates, graduates and family student housing, according to UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason. Of that total, 9,144 will be for undergraduate students. 

That’s 90 fewer beds than fall 2023, when the campus had 9,524 total capacity. 

Hernandez-Jason said the reduction is due to several factors, including that  “some spaces are offline for maintenance, some undergraduate housing was converted to graduate housing, and the Village’s A1 community, which is owned by our agroecology program, will once again be used for that program,” he told Lookout via email. 

The campus has faced rising pressure for decades from the County of Santa Cruz and City of Santa Cruz to build more housing for its students as the region struggles to manage a housing crisis. 

In two ongoing lawsuits, the City of Santa Cruz and the university are arguing over water access as well as the university’s plan to increase its enrollment by 8,500 students by 2040. 

In August 2022, a court ruled in the city’s favor over water access – saying the city wasn’t required to supply water to UCSC property outside of city limits. The university appealed and a final decision on the matter is expected by the summer, according to Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley. 

The other case, related to the university’s plan to increase its enrollment by 8,500 students, stems from the university’s Long Range Development Plan – which is the guiding and planning document for long-term projects for the university. After the UC Board of Regents approved the plan in 2021, the city filed a lawsuit against the university in February 2022 citing concerns over potential worsening impacts on the region’s housing market.

For the past year or so, Keeley told Lookout, city and the university officials had about four conversations to see if they could settle the legal disputes outside of the courts. Keeley said in a phone call with Chancellor Cynthia Larive last week, however, they decided to pause the conversations until the cases are resolved. 

“The chancellor and I agree there’s no benefit to having conversations until that has happened,” he said. “Then we’ll each see what the outcome is and determine whether we want to sit down.” 

Keeley said the city’s goal is to get the university to tie enrollment growth to on-campus housing. “I still think that doing that in a non-litigious way is in everybody’s interest, but that is not the path that’s chosen right now,” he said.