Dear Administration: Put Students Before Your Salaries

Last week Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Wayne Magdziarz previewed yet another tuition increase for the next academic year — this time up 3.9% to $53,710.

Last year Magdziarz also announced a 3.9% increase in tuition. Two years before he announced a 4.5% increase, the largest in a decade of yearly increases averaging 3.6%.

By the start of the 2025-2026 academic year, Loyola’s tuition will be over 28% and almost $12,000 higher than it was almost a decade ago in 2016.

What Magdziarz conveniently left out last week is how in only six years since his appointment as CFO, his own salary has also jumped roughly 29% from $401,638 to $518,683 according to the university’s fiscal year 2023 990s.

University administration shouldn’t be raising our tuition if they’re going to raise their own salaries.

Loyola has become the land of 10,000 bosses, with deans, directors, assistants, associates, interims, managers, coordinators, provosts and so many other administrative titles they’ve all become near meaningless. Despite their superfluity, this alphabet soup of administration makes more money than anyone else at the university.

In FY22, the top 68 highest paid employees and trustees collectively received a total of $12,076,028 in compensation. This is a more than 74% increase from a decade ago in FY12 where only 23 of the highest paid employees and trustees together made $6,925,182.

Not one of the highest compensated employees in 2022-2023 was a professor. Nor were any the year before.

The university’s administration is a bloated entity, more closely resembling a gaggle of excessively bureaucratic corporate executives than leaders of an institution for higher learning.

In FY23 Vice President for Civic Engagement and Government Affairs Phillip Hale made over 39% more than he did ten years before in FY13. When Magdziarz was still senior vice president for capital planning in 2013, his total compensation was almost 40% less than what he made last fiscal year.

From July 2012 to June 2013, Treasurer/Investment Officer Eric Jones made $238,483 and Dean of the Stritch School of Medicine Linda Brubaker made $394,848. 

In the most recently available tax documents, the treasurer and chief investment officer are now two separate jobs, which paid Susan Bodin $276,643 and Katharine Wyatt $501,513 respectively in FY23. Current Stritch Dean Sam Marzo was compensated $770,423. In 2013, only two people were paid $633,331 for these positions. Nowadays three people, collectively paid 144% more, are apparently needed to fulfill the same tasks originally accomplished by two.

President Mark Reed made his Form 990 debut in FY23 with a seemingly meager $372,570 in total compensation. If you compare this to the $321,527 previous university president Jo Ann Rooney made in her first year on the FY17 990 — which quickly grew 148% to almost $800,000 by FY19 — there’s no doubt Reed has a much fatter check coming his way.

This administrative inflation follows a growing national trend across universities of spending more and more on administrative positions and institutional support systems rather than instruction. Admittedly this has contributed to some positive additions, including the creation of new academic infrastructure for non-traditional students, diversity equity and inclusion, student mental health and other support systems for students.

But if the university keeps raising tuition, the student activity fee, meal plan rates and on-campus housing rates every year, the barriers to entry to this school will be too great for those support systems to ever be accessible and truly matter.

If trimming the fat on the ostensibly overstuffed bureaucracy that runs this school and eats up millions more of the budget each year could help the next inevitable tuition increase be even a tenth of a percent lower, they should reconsider the cost-benefit analysis to actually improve student lives.