The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located in Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2024, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,940 undergraduate and 1,998 graduate students.