The town halls were held March 25-27 and disclosed information about financial challenges the university faces and how it will tackle them.
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The town halls were held March 25-27 and disclosed information about financial challenges the university faces and how it will tackle them.
In the second and final series of finance town halls held this school year, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Wayne Magdziarz detailed the university’s budget for the coming fiscal year and discussed how Loyola is preparing for challenges facing higher education.
At the March 27 Lake Shore Campus town hall, Magdziarz discussed changes which were made in the current budget — fiscal year 2025 — to ensure the university would achieve its revenue target of $12 million. Despite some unexpected increases in revenue stemming from better than expected first-year and transfer student enrollment, university expenses have still risen 2% more than revenue, according to Magdziarz.
Magdziarz said lower than expected residence hall occupancy and enrollment in the accelerated nursing program have resulted in a “razor-thin” revenue margin, forcing the university to reduce non-salary budget expenses by $4 million to meet their target.
As a result, Magdziarz said the university is “slow walking” hiring processes for open staff positions and is recommending departments eliminate positions which have been vacant for several months.
He also said the university will need to assess staffing — identifying excess in non-essential areas and reducing headcount where it’s deemed necessary. Magdziarz said this will include cutting unfilled positions and consolidating responsibilities as the university won’t be able to sustain current faculty and staffing levels for much longer.
“We took some mid-year changes working with the provost, the deans and the vice presidents to try and pull back and give us a bit more of a cushion this year,” Magdziarz said.
He said the university uses its excess revenue to pay off debt, fund staff pensions and benefit packages and give extra funding to programs throughout the university.
In the upcoming fiscal year 2026, Magdziarz said Loyola is budgeting for $15 million in overall revenue and will start the year in a position of financial strength. He said enrollment numbers are looking strong, and Loyola is expecting to meet their target of 2,775 first-year students in addition to seeing full occupancy in residence halls — a key source of revenue.
Magdziarz said the university plans to take on $200 million in debt to fund the construction of a new nursing and science building on the site where Campion Hall currently sits. Campion’s demolition and the development of the new academic building beginning this summer are the first major projects in Loyola’s 10-year Campus Plan, The Phoenix previously reported.
The projects which are top of the agenda include additional student recreation space and a welcome site for touring students, likely to be located where Flanner Hall is, according to Magdziarz.
He said the university is in a strong position to start assuming debt again after it spent the last decade paying off the debt accumulated during the last string of campus development projects overseen by former President Michael Garanzini S.J. in the 2000s.
He said the major credit ratings agencies gave Loyola an “excellent” rating and the university expects to pay just $2.7 million in interest at a 1.35% percent rate.
However, there are significant upcoming challenges which Magdziarz said are impacting how Loyola has been planning for the future, chief among them the enrollment cliff which will begin to have an effect next school year.
The cliff stems from a decline in birth rates following the Great Recession, which has resulted in a smaller pool of students enrolling in higher education, forcing Loyola to spend more in order to compete with peer universities, The Phoenix previously reported.
Magdziarz said Midwest high school graduates will decline by 16% over the next 17 years, with a 32% decrease in Illinois. As a result, he said revenue from tuition will become thinner and the university will have a need to expand financial aid offerings to potentially unhealthy levels.
These impacts are being magnified by a general drop in “confidence in higher education,” which is down to just 36% in 2023 compared to 57% in 2015, according to Magdziarz. He said to combat this, Loyola needs to continue building its brand in order to better attract students and their families — a guiding aim of the Campus Plan.
Another answer to the enrollment cliff Loyola is pursuing is an increased effort to attract international students, something the university has partnered with the private firm Shorelight Education LLC — which helps match international students with American universities — to achieve, according to Magdziarz.
“That said, you all recall that the last time there was a Trump administration there was a significant pull back on visas for students from other countries to come here,” Magdziarz said. “So we’re looking at that as both a potential opportunity but also something that’s a little squishy now that we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Through the Shorelight contract, Magdziarz said the university is hoping to reach a first-year enrollment target of 3,000 students by 2029.
Magdziarz noted an increase in transfer student enrollment during this fiscal year compared to previous years. However, he said current trends are unsustainable, and if Loyola doesn’t implement some budgetary and structural changes then expenses will exceed revenues as soon as fiscal year 2027 — with the university forecasted to be $41 million in the red by fiscal year 2029.
To avoid this, Magdziarz laid out several guiding principles which he said will help Loyola stay on track financially, starting with a 2% reduction in non-student facing operating expenses — roughly $3.5 million.
He said Loyola must be bold, and will need to reallocate funds from programs with low enrollment to those which are “high-demand” and present opportunities for institutional growth.
“This is a cruel message to deliver and I’ve delivered it to deans so I’ll say it all of you as well, new programs, especially at the master’s level, that have an opportunity to get us 20 students in five years — not interested, not going to matter, you won’t even notice it on any of these numbers,” Magdziarz said. “We have to think big, bold, grand and be able to launch programs that will have a material impact on our operation budget.”
Under the stewardship of new Provost and Chief Academic Officer Douglas Woods, Loyola launched a new program incubator to pilot new programs with high enrollment potential, according to Magdziarz.
“Think of this as an opportunity for venture capital,” Magdziarz said. “So if a faculty member or group of faculty members come together and they have an opportunity or they think a particular program can be started and grown it is resourced, it is assessed and dare I say after two or three years if the program is not meeting its enrollment objectives we sunset it and we move on. We gave it the old college try, and we move on and reallocate those resources elsewhere.”
He said the university is working to increase its fundraising efforts and is pursuing strategic partnerships with other universities to help offset some of the financial burden it faces. He said additional enrollment which will come from the new nursing and science center will help the university oversee revenue growth that outpaces expenses.
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