Quick Take
Cabrillo College has launched a national search for its next president, who will be tasked with addressing enrollment declines, multimillion-dollar budget deficits, and the college’s first on-campus housing project amid a challenging political and financial landscape. The new leader will succeed Matt Wetstein and must also navigate high housing costs, shifting federal policies, and growing calls for educational equity and community engagement.
Cabrillo College last week launched its national search for a new president who will have to tackle declining enrollment, multimillion-dollar deficits, the creation of the college’s first student housing project and a federal administration focus on slashing funding to higher education.
Cabrillo College governing board trustee Christina Cuevas, who is on the ad hoc committee leading the search for the next president, didn’t mince words when describing the importance of the role.
“I think we can’t underscore enough…that this is a big job that someone really needs to be prepared to give it their all,” she said. “It’s not a simple management opportunity. It really isn’t.”
The search comes as Matt Wetstein prepares to leave the position at the end of the year after serving as college president for about eight years.
Broadly, the president is the leader and spokesperson of the college. The head develops the budget and proposes personnel decisions to the board for adoption, and as stated in the job description, they also build trust with stakeholders and stay up-to-date with laws and trends with potential impacts to the college.
Cabrillo faces significant challenges. Enrollment has dropped nearly 12%, or by 1,088 students, since the 2019-2020 school year to about 8,200 students. College officials say the decline mirrors national trends in falling college enrollment, particularly since the pandemic, and has also been driven by students who were displaced by natural disasters, including the 2020 CZU Complex Fire and 2023 Pajaro River flood. Local rental costs that rank among the nation’s least affordable have also pushed students to cheaper parts of California or out of state.
As the school’s enrollment declines, the college’s funding goes down with it. While Cabrillo qualified for funding based on prior years when enrollment was higher, that elevated funding is winding down in the next year and will be entirely gone by the 2027-28 school year. Fiscal challenges have caused budget deficits of $4.3 million last year and $5.5 million this fiscal year. To address the deficits, Cabrillo cut dozens of courses and offered early retirement incentives. It is attempting to cut 5 to 10% in operational expenses and find ways to increase enrollment.
The college is building its first on-campus housing development at its Aptos campus that it hopes will address declining enrollment, housing affordability and, ultimately, its budget challenges. It’s a complex project that is a joint effort with UC Santa Cruz. The housing will create 376 beds for Cabrillo students and 248 beds for UCSC students. Officials hope to break ground this fall and plans for students to move into the units in fall 2027.
Finally, the college, as Wetstein bluntly laid out in a Lookout opinion piece, is facing unprecedented impacts and policy changes from the Trump administration. In the piece, Wetstein emphasized the harm done to communities by the federal government’s axing of diversity, equity and inclusion programs as well as its attempt to mass deport undocumented immigrants.
To help in its search for its next president, Cabrillo College hired the same California-based search firm who helped select Wetstein in 2018, Professional Personnel Leasing, or PPL. The firm’s Vice President, Jim Riggs, is leading the national search. The ad hoc committee of the board organizing the search includes trustees Donna Ziel, Ken Wagman and Cuevas, and is supported by a screening committee of community members which those trustees will select.
Vice-President of Human Resources and Labor Relations Angela Hoyt said the college isn’t specifying a salary range because it’s typically negotiated between candidate and trustees.
To include community input, Cabrillo officials conducted a survey in the spring that asked college and community members three open-ended questions about the most important qualities they are looking for in the school’s next top leader. The college received responses from 162 respondents. Based on that, it created a list of recurring themes and characteristics that community members are seeking in the new president.
Listed as “key focus areas,” on the college’s president search website, they include “strengthen community engagement and partnerships, align career education programs with workforce and community needs, foster trust and a positive campus culture and enhance student support and basic needs,” among others.
Hoyt said the full survey results weren’t released to the community “in part because, to a significant degree, the aspects of this recruitment are confidential.”
One of the many to fill out the survey was Cabrillo economics instructor Greg Hanle.
He said the college needs someone who can expertly manage budget issues, the federal government’s immigration crackdown and diversity issues as well as the housing challenges of the area.
“All of these things fold into this basic idea of, ‘how best can we promote access to higher education for our community?’” he said.
Hanle was also recently selected to be the college’s faculty union president. He’s been teaching at Cabrillo since 2010. Hanle hopes that the college’s next president can unify the community and continue focusing on important issues like basic needs and updates to history curriculum – which is what he thinks most have turned their attention to after the college underwent a contentious year during an effort to rename the college in 2023.
In September that year, the board voted to postpone any discussion of changing the name until at least 2028. Opponents of the eponym, 16th-century European explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, said the college shouldn’t be named after someone who profited off of the enslavement of native people in Guatemala.
Cuevas said that people in the community often ask her about the future of the name-change discussion. She reiterated that while trustees voted to postpone the discussion for another three years, “it wasn’t a promise that we would bring it up then.” She hasn’t specifically heard requests from people recently that the college change its name.
She said that since the renaming vote, the college has put its efforts toward addressing the concerns of people related to student success and curriculum who had requested the name change initially.
“What people really want is more appropriate curriculum and support for Native students,” she said. “And actually not just for Native students, but that all students are aware of what the contributions and the challenges have been to the Native community.”
Following the college’s Sept. 15 deadline for people to apply for the president’s job, the human resources department and PPL will review the applications to ensure they meet the minimal qualifications for a first round of interviews. The screening committee will have meetings to discuss interview questions and will review the applicants who meet the minimum qualifications to select who will get a first-round interview, which will occur in mid-October.
The screening committee will interview the qualified applicants and then make recommendations to the governing board for the second round of interviews. Those finalists will receive private interviews with college leaders, a public forum or forums for community members and a confidential interview with the governing board.
The governing board is then expected to vote on the selection of a new president in early December so the successful candidate can start shortly after Wetstein departs at the end of that month.