Tuition Set to Increase by 3.9% for 2024-25 School Year

Loyola announced Jan. 22 a 3.9% tuition increase for the upcoming 2024-25 school year which will add an additional $1,960 to annual costs, bringing the university’s tuition to $52,230. 

Last year, Loyola announced the greatest tuition increase in over a decade last year with tuition going up by 4.5% for the 2023-24 academic year, The Phoenix previously reported. 

In addition to the increase in the tuition, the student activity fee will increase by 3.9% as well as the all-access meal plan which will increase by 2.7%, according to the announcement. Traditional on-campus housing will increase by 3.5% and apartment-style dorm prices will vary based on accommodations provided with the dorms.  

Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer/Chief Business Officer Wayne Magdziarz said the strategic financial planning team — the group of people who come up with the university’s operating budget — starts meeting in August to prepare for the board presentation for the fiscal year at their December board meeting. 

When creating a budget for the year, Magdziarz said they look at things like enrollment, the environment for hiring and retaining employees, and healthcare costs. 

“All of the major financial levers, if you will, make up the operating budget,” Magdziarz said. “Once we start to have all of those variables we plug those into our various models, and our objective, obviously, is to make sure that we can keep any tuition increase as low as possible.” 

Magdziarz said they try to see if they can work with different variables like boosting enrollment in select graduate programs in order to get the tuition increase down for students. 

Once the budget is solidified by the strategic financial planning team, it goes in front of the Board of Trustees where they discuss the full yearly budget and approve it for the fiscal year. 

All new revenue needs from one year to the next are driven by new investment areas and the salary increase pool of faculty and staff, according to Magdziarz.

New or additional investments for the fiscal year 2025 include additions to the student development area for things like wellness and mental health as well as investments toward the second and third years of strategic plans, which are going into place for the Stritch School of Medicine and the School for Environmental Sustainability.  

Magdziarz said the school is also increasing its student financial aid by $17 million for the next fiscal year.  

Loyola is also on a three-year plan to add additions to faculty and salaries to look at where they stand in relation to various faculty ranks across the school to ensure they still stay competitive, according to Magdziarz. 

In addition, Magdziarz said the strategic financial team removed over $18 million in expenses from the budget as a preemptive measure. Magdziarz said this didn’t affect students because they focused on faculty and staff positions.

“On the staff side, we had the vice president take a very good look at all of the funded staff position that were on the pipeline that weren’t filled to see if we could save staff salary dollars by either combining some of those positions or moving those dollars around to existing staff members who potentially were capable of taking on additional responsibilities,” Magdziarz said. 

Similarly, the office of the provost worked with the deans of each of the schools to see if faculty lines could be collapsed or combined to try and save more salary dollars.

This is an initiative Magdziarz spoke about at his financial town hall Sept. 27, The Phoenix previously reported.

“If we did that now, we could really avoid a lot of big surprises or big swings in the 2025 budget, and it seems to have materialized,” Magdziarz said. 

Magdziarz said he and the leadership team as well as the Board of Trustees work hard to ensure tuition increases aren’t high and all of the money collected from tuition goes to the students. 

“We really work hard to try and make sure that we don’t have  b  to add even a tenth of a percent on a tuition increase every year because we recognize that the cost of higher education is an investment for students and their families,” Magdziarz said.

Junior Psychology major Akash Goel said when he saw the initial email about the tuition increase, he wasn’t surprised by it but was a little shocked by the extra fees that came along with the increase such as the campus housing and dining hall plan increase. 

“I would have really appreciated it if they would have put those fees in that email because not everyone is going to click the link to read more,” Goel said. 

Goel said it all seemed a little deceptive because all of the increases as well as where the money from the tuition increase is going seemed a bit unclear. 

Featured Image by Ryan Pittman / The Phoenix