Quick Take
UC Santa Cruz will extend its faculty hiring slowdown to address an $80 million deficit, planning to hire only five professors this year and none next year while allowing its faculty ranks to shrink by about 11% through attrition.
UC Santa Cruz will extend its faculty hiring slowdown as it works to close a budget gap, with school officials telling faculty members that the university will hire five professors this year and none next year.
Interim Campus Provost Paul Koch told a regular meeting of the school’s faculty Friday that the university expects to shrink its total faculty by 66, or 11%, through not filling retirements and separations. At the same time, he said, UCSC will hire just five faculty members this year and none next year. UCSC employs about 670 faculty.
Koch, Chancellor Cindy Larive and other administrators were speaking to faculty at the UCSC Academic Senate meeting. The faculty governing body sets policy on a range of topics such as curriculum, admissions and budgeting, and meets once each quarter.
UCSC is projecting a deficit of about $80 million this fiscal year, following several years of significant negative operating balances. It began addressing its budget shortfall in 2023 through cutting operations expenses, layoffs and a hiring freeze. The campus has reduced costs by about $70 million thus far, but on Friday, officials said they still have more painful cuts to come.
Koch told the meeting that the ranks of UCSC’s faculty grew nearly 16% between the 2019-20 and 2024-25 school years, or from 573 to 663. Last year was “the largest faculty that we’ve had in the history of the university,” but the number is now four fewer faculty members this academic year, he added. Part of that increase was due to the university’s 2022 Faculty 100 campaign, an initiative to hire 100 new faculty in 10 years to reach nearly 700 faculty by about 2032.
The growth in faculty hiring eclipsed the growth in enrollment, with the total number of full-time-equivalent students increasing by just 3% between 2019-2020 and 2024-25.
Koch said boosting the number of faculty was necessary to address what had been among the worst faculty-student ratios in the University of California system at the time. However, he said, the university hired too many too quickly.
“The problem is we didn’t have the resources to do it in five years, especially when our enrollments are flat, because our housing wasn’t coming online,” he said, referring to campus student housing projects that have been delayed by lawsuits. “So, we grew disproportionately fast.”
As the university increases its student enrollment and continues to reduce the faculty ranks, UCSC officials project that by 2030, the campus will have 635 faculty and a ratio of 36 students for every one faculty member. One faculty member at the meeting noted that the ratio would be worse than the 32.5-to-1 student-faculty ratio the school had in 2019 before it embarked on its hiring spree, and significantly higher than the 28.9-to-1 ratio it had in the past academic year.
Koch said that as the university focuses on growing enrollment, it is planning to grow tuition revenue “in ways that will begin to let us ameliorate the student faculty ratio issues.”
Additionally, he said non-faculty cuts UCSC has been making to trim its spending are affecting the university’s operations.
“The cuts away from the faculty side and from the instructional side are already having an impact on our ability to function, and they’re already very painful,” he said. “This next year is going to be more painful. Those cuts, they’re going to be more painful.”
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