UCSC aims to cut vacant faculty jobs, attract international students to fix budget gap, new interim provost says

UC Santa Cruz is making strides toward closing a large budget deficit, having so far trimmed about $70 million toward a targeted $170 million in annual savings, the school’s new interim campus provost, Paul Koch, said in an interview with Lookout. But he added that the campus has more work to do to fill its financial hole and is exploring plans to boost international enrollment, expand online courses and cut about 60 faculty positions by not filling vacancies.

“We’ve made about $70 million in cuts since we began this – a lot of it’s through not filling separations,” he said. “We’ve got more to go.” 

Koch took on the role as the school’s second-most-powerful administrator July 15 after Lori Kletzer stepped down from the post. He plans to do the job for about a year as the university conducts a monthslong search for a permanent provost. He is a distinguished professor of earth & planetary science and previously served as dean of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division from 2011 to 2023. Campus spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason said the search will start “soon.” Koch didn’t apply for the permanent provost role. 

As chief academic officer, Koch oversees the university’s five academic divisions, is the primary liaison with the university’s Academic Senate – or faculty leadership – and broadly ensures that the campus is best using its resources to support academics. 

The job is a challenging position on its own, and Koch faces added difficulties this year amid the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on higher education, the university’s structural deficit, UCSC’s student enrollment constraints from limited housing options in the country’s least affordable rental market and a student population with some of the highest rates of mental health challenges. 

UCSC lost a total of $30 million in federal grants earlier this year, though the majority of the terminated federal funding has been reinstated. Still, the sudden terminations and reinstatements have caused chaos and instability, officials have told Lookout. 

At the same time, UCSC has been implementing its own budget cuts as well as attempting to increase revenues to address its budget deficit. In the spring, UCSC officials said they expected to close fiscal year 2025 with an $80 million deficit. Hernandez-Jason told Lookout the university is preparing to release a budget update to the campus next week with details about the full fiscal year. 

This past year, Koch served on the school’s revenue augmentation committee, which was focused on how the university could earn more money in order to reduce the necessary cuts and layoffs. He said one of the most impactful ways to increase revenue is to enroll more international and out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition fees. 

He hopes the university can increase its international student enrollment from its current levels of about 5% of the student body up to pre-pandemic levels of about 10%. 

Koch said the committee is also looking into expanding UCSC’s online classes offered during summer sessions that students — including those enrolled at other University of California campuses — need to fulfill their major requirements in the school’s largest degree programs, like psychology. 

“Teaching those summer classes for our own students, and ideally for students that aren’t Santa Cruz students … it helps our bottom line and it actually helps with time-to-degree and student retention,” he said. 

Additionally, Koch said the university expects that to cut the number of faculty positions by about 60, out of about 670 total. He said UCSC will reduce its faculty numbers by not filling vacant positions after faculty members leave their positions. 

After accounting for the 70 faculty members brought on board during a hiring campaign started in 2022, Koch said the net loss is about 10 faculty. But those hired in recent years weren’t hired to fill future or anticipated vacancies, so Koch said, there will be gaps in certain subject areas. 

“It’s not good. There’s nothing good about that – that’s undoing five years’ worth of really careful work and thought,” he said. “The question is, how to manage those losses, because those losses are not necessarily where we hired, right? Part of my work this year is to be very carefully imagining, ‘Where are the retirements likely to be, and what do we do if it happens?’”

Student success focus 

Beyond overseeing the school’s budget process, Koch’s main initiative this year is to focus on student success, including improving retention and graduation rates. To start, he’s going to explore what the experience is like for students in their first year at the university, both academically and socially, through listening sessions and polling students and college provosts. 

UCSC’s retention rate for first-year students who return to their second year was 88%, according to 2024 data. Koch said that the UC systemwide has an agreement with Gov. Gavin Newsom to have that rate at 90%. 

Koch said he’d like to learn from other schools that have higher retention rates or that are structuring their students’ experiences differently. Some schools have more social events, and many place students in cohorts so they have matching schedules, which proponents say help students build stronger relationships with their peers and keep them from dropping out. 

“There’s a lot of ideas that are different from what we’re currently doing, and some of those schools have better retention rates than we do,” Koch said. 

He says his goal when he became the dean of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division in 2011 is similar to his goals today as the university’s second-in-command. 

He wants to make the UC’s rigorous and globally competitive higher education experience available to as many students as he can, and especially to students who have historically faced barriers to higher education, such as those who are first in their family to attend college and Latino and Hispanic students. 

In 2012, the university earned the federal designation of Hispanic Serving Institution as it enrolled more than 25% Hispanic students. The Trump administration earlier this month canceled several grants for Hispanic Serving Institutions, including for programs at UCSC. 

UCSC was the third University of California school to join the program, which made it eligible for federal funding geared toward programs promoting the success of Hispanic students but which all students can participate in. Despite the many changes in federal funding cuts, Koch believes UCSC can still offer a meaningful experience to students from historically underserved communities. 

“I understood we could change the nation – if we could intersect the benefits of that kind of high-quality research education with this population of students for the first time in U.S. history at volume” he said. “That’s what made me get up every day – that mission.”

FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated to correct the total number of faculty.

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