Quick Take
Despite again accepting a record number of first-year students, overall enrollment at UC Santa Cruz won’t grow this year. It will be enrolling about 5,700 first-year and transfer students this fall, but overall undergraduate enrollment will be flat at about 17,800 students.
After making a major jump in offers of admission in 2023, UC Santa Cruz accepted 10 times the number of potential first-year students this year than will actually attend. Despite this strategy, overall enrollment will remain about the same as in recent years.
At the end of June, when the University of California system compiled preliminary admissions data for its nine undergraduate campuses, UCSC had sent 46,582 admission offers to first-year students – like last year, the most of any of the campuses.
Michelle Whittingham, UCSC’s associate vice chancellor of enrollment management since 2007, said the university expects to have about 4,400 first-year students enroll for the fall – representing about 9% to 10% of the students who received offers.
Last year, the university sent offers to 43,054 first-year students and 4,381 enrolled in the fall – representing just over 10% of those who received offers. That was a big jump in offers from the 2022-23 academic year, when about 16% chose to enroll out of the more than 31,000 who received acceptance letters.
Since preliminary admissions data was published July 31, the number of offers and admissions have changed slightly at each campus, including at UCSC. Fall quarter at UCSC doesn’t begin until Sept. 21 and the enrollment data won’t be finalized until later in the quarter. Still, in total, UCSC plans to enroll 5,700 new first-year students and transfer students this fall, compared to 5,500 last year. Whittingham said the overall undergraduate enrollment, however, will remain at about 17,800.
Of the total 5,700 new students coming to campus this fall, about 1,330 will be transfer students – representing an increase of about 19% over last year, from 1,113 transfers.
“I’m most excited about the increase in transfer numbers,” said Whittingham. “And that increase is by design.”
Whittingham said UCSC saw a drop in applications from transfer students during the pandemic, but those numbers are starting to increase again. In 2020, the university admitted a record number of transfer students at 7,920, and since then it’s dropped each year. This current cycle is the first year the university increased its offers of admissions to transfer students, and did so by nearly 9%: from 7,162 in 2023 up to its new peak of 7,799 this year.
UC campuses, according to the California Master Plan for Higher Education, strive to enroll one transfer student per two first-year students. First approved by the UC regents and the State Board of Education in 1960, the plan also calls for the campuses to admit students in the top 9% of their high schools.
Whittingham said UC Santa Cruz hasn’t always been able to keep up with the plan’s transfer admission goal, but it’s working toward that, and she’s excited about this year’s improvement.
She said UCSC staff work with community college students all over the state, and especially with local community colleges, to help with applications and scholarships.
“We’re really trying to amplify our message,” Whittingham said. “We want to be there to serve them as the community colleges have worked really hard to bring the students back [from the pandemic] and so we’re doing our part to connect with those community colleges and students.”
The UC preliminary admission data release also includes the gender identity of first-year California students admitted to the campuses. It breaks down as 55% women, 40% men, 3% “different identity/unknown,” 2% nonbinary and less than 1% trans man or trans woman.
Of the total 1,453 nonbinary students admitted to UC schools, UCSC admitted 683 – more than any other campus.
Whittingham said UCSC is well known as a campus that supports students with intersectional identities and has a long history of that. The Lionel Cantú Queer Resource Center has origins going back to 1971.
“The key is that Santa Cruz is really recognized, certainly throughout the state of California and beyond, I think even nationally, for our commitment to students of many intersectional identities,” Whittingham said.
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