The University of Southern California has issued layoff notices to more than 900 employees since July amid a fiscal crisis that has battered morale and strained resources.
The cuts, detailed in a Monday letter to the USC community by interim President Beong-Soo Kim, are central to an effort to erase a budget deficit that ballooned to more than $200 million. The layoffs have included employees across the university and its health system, including student academic advisers.
But Kim, who succeeded former President Carol Folt on July 1, wrote that as many 200 of those who received layoff notices could remain with the university in new positions. And he noted that the job cuts are nearly complete.
“The layoffs, of course, fall most heavily on those losing their jobs, but everyone else in our community also feels their impact — through the emotional strain of losing colleagues and friends, the resulting stresses on departments and units, and the challenge of doing more with fewer resources,” Kim wrote.
USC’s deficit grew dramatically during the final year of Folt’s tenure, mushrooming from $158 million to upwards of $200 million — an increase of more than 26%.
The private university, traditionally known for its wealth, embarked on several pricey projects in recent years, among them the opening of a campus in Washington, D.C., that included buying a building there for about $49 million.
In 2021, USC agreed to pay $1.1 billion in settlements to former patients of university gynecologist George Tyndall — the largest sex abuse payout in the history of higher education.
USC had announced a spate of austerity measures in March, including a hiring freeze, a reassessment of capital spending projects and restrictions on discretionary spending.
Now, with the layoffs, Kim said that USC is “on track to eliminate our long-term deficit” by the end of the fiscal year that concludes in June.
“Notwithstanding this encouraging news, we cannot afford the luxury of complacency,” Kim wrote in the letter. “First, our fiscal progress must be monitored carefully to ensure we reach our budgetary goals for this fiscal year and can sustainably generate positive margins in the future.”
The USC actions come at a time of unprecedented threats against universities by the Trump administration, which has slashed billions of dollars in funding at campuses across the country.
On Oct. 16, USC rejected President Trump’s education compact, which offers priority research funding to universities in exchange for following Trump’s conservative vision. At the time, Kim wrote that tying research benefits to signing the compact “would, over time, undermine the same values of free inquiry and academic excellence that [it] seeks to promote.”
Kim’s latest letter obliquely referenced a chaotic year for universities amid Trump’s effort to remake higher education. He noted the presence of “significant stresses,” “uncertainty” and “scrutiny” in higher education, adding, “More disruptions are coming, even if we can’t predict their timing or form.”
“During these volatile times, it’s important to be agile, remain open to different perspectives and ideas, and never lose sight of our long-term mission and values,” Kim said.
The layoffs have come as USC has steadily raised tuition and fees to become one of the most expensive colleges in the U.S. The university — which has been buffeted by controversy in recent years, including scandals involving Tyndall and former medical school dean Carmen A. Puliafito — projects the cost of undergraduate attendance for the upcoming academic year to be $99,139, including housing.
Historically, layoffs at USC have been rare. The 1990s, marked by a recession brought on by the collapse of the region’s aerospace industry, saw two notable rounds of job cuts.
In 1992, USC laid off 58 people and eliminated 31 vacant positions to pare down a $15-million deficit. Three years later, at least 100 faculty members at the medical school took pay cuts and an undisclosed number were dismissed as part of a plan to address an $11-million deficit.
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