UCSC looks to cut grad student admissions, alter funding guarantee

UC Santa Cruz is cutting graduate student admissions and attaching new conditional language to offer letters this fall, senior campus officials told a gathering of faculty members last week, as universities across the country adjust to financial pressures from the Trump White House.

Doctoral student admissions could be cut by about 9% in the coming academic year, Campus Provost Lori Kletzer told a meeting of the UCSC Academic Senate last Wednesday. The Academic Senate is a group of faculty members who provide guidance or consultation on curriculum and make rules on issues affecting faculty and students.

The university is also looking at including language in letters to graduate students that their offers are subject to change — and are not guaranteed — “based on action by the federal and or state government, including as to funding,” school officials told the senate. 

UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason declined to confirm which programs would be affected, or by how much admissions would be cut. “The information shared at the Academic Senate meeting was for discussion and part of our overall deliberative process,” he wrote in an email Friday. “It’s premature to provide firm projections around graduate student enrollment for the coming academic year.”

Hernandez-Jason added that while UCSC tries to carefully manage enrollment, it is not pausing all graduate student admissions, as some universities across the country have done. “We remain committed to welcoming a new cohort of doctoral and MFA [master of fine arts] students in the coming year,” he wrote.

However, faculty union co-chair Deborah Gould told Lookout “these are cuts that affect every department with a graduate program” and will damage undergraduate education and research. 

“It’s a very serious attack on higher education, and really frightening,” she said, in reference to Trump’s cuts to higher education funding.

Officials didn’t respond to requests about reductions to master’s degree program admissions, but Gould said she was aware of at least one MFA program that was told it had to reduce admissions by one student. 

UCSC is also looking at adding wording to offer letters around funding commitments for doctoral and MFA students to say that their funding can be “modified, reduced or rescinded, and is not guaranteed,” Kletzer said. 

Funding commitments let students know they will have financial support as they complete their degree, including through paid fellowships, researcher appointments and work as teaching assistants.

Kletzer told the faculty meeting that the university will continue to “hold” a five-year funding commitment for doctoral students who started last fall and years prior. 

Five-year funding commitments were “never a guarantee,” and have previously included requirements for graduate students to remain in good standing, she said. But offer letters from prior years didn’t include explicit language allowing the university to rescind the commitment for financial reasons. “It is now something where, if the funding environment changes, we have now put down a marker that allows us to rescind the commitment,” Kletzer said. 

Kletzer said she knew the timing of the admissions reductions had left some departments “in a difficult place,” with some professors having already discussed informal offers with future students. “A lot of these changes happened at the last minute, and it’s created a lot of confusion, chaos and anxiety among programs,” Chad Saltikov, chair of the senate’s Graduate Council, told the faculty.

Some departments had already reduced graduate student admissions weeks ago due to both the university’s budget deficit and the federal funding concerns. Gould told Lookout this recent reduction is an additional one for some departments. “Admissions were already being cut, and this just amplified that,” she said. 

The planned changes are mainly due to uncertainties around federal funding, Saltikov told the meeting.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has said he’ll eliminate funding to schools using federal dollars for diversity programs and to universities he says failed to protect Jewish students during pro-Palestine protests this past year. His administration canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University over accusations of antisemitism on campus. 

News of the admissions reductions and funding conditions has left some graduate students anxious. “We’re seeing a lot of concern and instability,” graduate student union vice-chair Jess Fournier said.

A fifth-year feminist studies doctoral student, Fournier said the lack of any funding guarantee will do nothing to help attract students to a doctoral program, particularly in expensive Santa Cruz County. 

“I think that is a huge indication to anybody that is thinking about coming here that this university does not actually prioritize graduate education,” they said. “Who would come to the most expensive place in the country, if you have no idea how you’re going to be able to make ends meet?” 

Gould said the work of graduate student workers is “integral to the work that faculty do” and to the mission of the university. Graduate student workers lead discussion sections for large lecture classes, often do the grading for undergraduate coursework and conduct research in labs. 

With fewer graduate students, sections where students discuss complicated theories and ideas could be canceled, fewer essays could be assigned because there will be fewer graduate workers to grade them, labs won’t be staffed properly and faculty won’t have as much time to do their own research as they will have to do more grading. 

“All of that is a really, really serious degradation of the education that we provide,” said Gould.

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