Interim President Beong-Soo Kim announced that the administration does not anticipate any further layoffs for the 2025 school year in a statement sent to faculty and staff on Monday.
Kim also discussed updates on USC’s financial resilience plan, reporting on current actions taken by the administration to reduce the deficit, including eliminating the Academic Achievement Award and Exceptional Funding programs.
Since July, USC has implemented several budget cuts, which have resulted in nearly 1,000 layoff notices issued. In his initial statement about the university’s budget cuts on July 14, President Kim said that budget cuts and other deficit-reducing actions were taken as a result of the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to university research funds.
The initial layoffs affected a number of departments across the campus, including the Keck School of Medicine and 135 employees who worked on the University Park Campus. Academic departments, including the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Rossier School of Education and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, have since let go of educational staff. Additionally, Viterbi and Dornsife have dismissed nearly all of their academic advisors — although some may be eligible to reapply for their jobs, likely at a lower salary.
According to the California Employment Development Department’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification report, the most recent round of staff cuts took place last Friday, resulting in the layoff of 259 employees.
Kim stated that he has also been considering and adopting ideas from faculty on how to reduce internal university costs, including temporary expenditure and travel holds to prevent further layoffs.
The email also stated the university would be ending a payroll practice “benefitting many of the highest compensated members” of the USC community. It was not clear what these practices include.
“We had on our financial resilience website, a place where people could provide comments,” Kim said in an interview on Tuesday. “We went through all of those comments, we incorporated a lot of them, and then I empowered individual deans and senior vice presidents and their leadership teams to figure out the best way to meet these new budget targets given the particulars of their functions and mission.”
As a result of these budget cuts, USC is reportedly on track to eliminate its “long-term deficit” by the end of the financial year.
The announcement also said that new research funding, fundraising efforts and endowment performance have all shown strong progress this year. Kim stated that the university is expecting to provide faculty merit increases for the 2027 fiscal year, although the size of the merit pool will not be finalized until next year.
With the announcement of the university’s financial deficit status, President Kim also addressed the distress faculty layoffs have had on departments and students alike, as they navigate the challenges of having access to less resources.
“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 said in his statement.
The statement said the university “cannot afford the luxury of complacency.” It indicated that the university will be monitoring “potential impacts” from the ongoing government shutdown and anticipates reductions to federal student loans.
“USC is up to these challenges – and they are absolutely worth taking on,” Kim’s statement reads.