Quick Take
Cabrillo College President Matt Wetstein told Lookout on Wednesday that the school plans to address an estimated $5.5 million budget deficit without layoffs or major cuts to classes. He said the deficit is “largely driven by our need to get smaller” after years of shrinking enrollment.
Cabrillo College is looking to cut about $5.5 million in spending to fix a budget deficit caused by declining enrollment, but hopes to do so while avoiding layoffs or dramatically slashing course offerings.
For the 2025-26 fiscal year, the college is expecting to budget about $89.1 million in revenues and about $94.6 million in expenses. This is the second year Cabrillo is operating at a deficit, after the college addressed a $4.3 million budget hole for this current fiscal year by cutting dozens of courses and offering early retirement incentives.
In an interview Wednesday, Cabrillo College President Matt Wetstein said this year’s deficit is “largely driven by our need to get smaller” in the face of multiple years of shrinking enrollment. The school is smaller by 1,088 students by overall head count compared to the 2019-20 academic year.
Wetstein told Lookout that school officials are focused on cost-saving measures, such as offering faculty and staff incentives to retire early and eliminating vacant positions, along with strategies to reduce student attrition, like changing the way freshmen can pick their classes. The college is also looking at eliminating courses, but the president said he didn’t have a total number yet. Last fiscal year, Cabrillo cut about 70 of its 1,394 classes.
Wetstein said he thinks the college can balance the budget and avoid layoffs through a range of measures.
This year, Cabrillo hopes to get between 15 to 20 faculty and staff to accept early retirement incentives, similar to the 17 who accepted early retirement last year. Ten of those 17 positions were eliminated, saving the school about $1.5 million. The college won’t know how many people plan to accept early retirement incentives until around September.
Cabrillo is also implementing a “hiring frost.” Rather than a blanket hiring freeze, officials are looking at each open position to determine if it should be filled.
During a Monday meeting of the college’s governing board, trustees approved eliminating two vacant positions: an administrative assistant and a student support specialist. Wetstein said such reductions will continue to happen as positions become vacant and officials work with union leaders to understand the impact of eliminating a specific position.
Wetstein said the college typically has around 15 positions vacant at the start of any academic year. Officials don’t expect to know until October or November what that final number will be for the upcoming year.
Cabrillo is also looking to trim 5 to 10% in operational expenses across the board. Wetstein said he’s asked each of the deans of the college to work with their faculty to figure out how best to implement those cuts. In total, the college spends about $12 million on operational costs such as travel, supplies and equipment. Trimming 10% of those expenses can save the school about $1.2 million.
Wetstein said officials are also looking at strategies to increase enrollment, which currently stands at about 8,200 students. This fall, the college will start using cohort-based enrollment for its freshmen class. In that scheduling model, freshmen interested in similar majors are grouped in cohorts of about 30 students who take several classes together. Typically, students create their own schedules on an individual basis, choosing from a wide range of options that could overwhelm students.
In the cohort-based scheduling model, student groups can develop relationships more easily as they’re taking several classes together at the same time.
“When you build those peer networks, we know that students are more likely to stay enrolled and we get better retention,” he said.
Cabrillo experimented with the scheduling model this year with one cohort of about 30 students. Westein said the cohort students completed an average of four more units in the fall term compared to other similar students, which puts them on track to complete their college education faster to either graduate or transfer to a four-year university. Cabrillo has plans to expand the new scheduling model to about 300 students in the fall.
Wetstein hopes to grow its current enrollment level to about 9,000 by 2028-29. Cabrillo has been receiving funding for an enrollment of 9,900 for the past five years after being granted an emergency allowance because of local environmental disasters that caused current and potential future students to leave the area, such as the 2020 CZU fire and the Pajaro River levee breach in 2023. That is set to wind down starting in the upcoming school year and end entirely in 2027-28.
“Growing enrollment means that we’re shrinking the gap between the 9,900 and the 8,200, and the more that we grow that or close that gap, the better that we are when we come out of emergency conditions to weather that reduction,” he said.
College officials don’t have an estimate yet for how much their budget balancing strategies will save them, or if they’ll reach the $5.5 million mark. Wetstein said that’s primarily due to the many factors that could change the size of its deficit, as well as how many people retire and how many positions end up becoming vacant that the college could choose to eliminate.
“That is just maddening and confusing as hell,” he said about the uncertainty over projecting the size of the school’s deficit. “It drives me crazy. It drives the faculty and staff crazy, because we always budget conservatively.”
Next week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom the governor will release a revised state budget showing how much the state will allocate to public agencies, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities for the upcoming year. After the release of the budget, Cabrillo officials will have a better sense of how much more, or less, they could be allocated by the state and have more certainty on the total deficit.
The college is closely monitoring how tariffs could affect its joint project with UC Santa Cruz to build student housing on its Aptos campus. The project, including the potential impact of tariffs on supplies like Canadian timber or products from China, is estimated at about $177 million, which is below the initial estimate of about $181 million. The project is set to break ground in October and is expected to be completed in fall 2027, when it will open 376 beds for Cabrillo students and 248 beds for UCSC students.
The college’s budget deficit doesn’t directly impact the housing project as that project is funded by bonds.
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