The 2024-2025 tuition will be increasing by 4.4% — from $54,400 to $56,800 for full-time undergraduate students. This increase is greater than last year’s, which was a 3.4% increase.
Inflation is a major driver for the price increase, according to Vice President for Finance & Operations Eric Barger.
“The cost of everything we have to pay for goes up,” Barger said. “The same things you notice when buying things, everything costs more.”
UP’s tuition has been on a steady increase, except for the 2021-2022 school year when the University implemented a tuition freeze.
With inflation, the University also faces an increase in costs to keep the campus running.
“Of course, there's inflation, so there's demand for us to increase salaries for faculty and staff,” Barger said. “Our property insurance just went up by 14%, our energy costs are [also] going up by 17%. These are large increases that we're having to pay for.”
Bon Appetit also has been increasing their costs with inflation. This resulted in higher meal plan prices for students, according to Barger.
“The Bon Appetit costs go up as well because they're driven mainly by the increasing cost of food, the increasing costs of labor and the increasing cost of transportation because all that food has to be delivered here,” Barger said. “They have three things that are driving their costs up as well, but we ended up having to pass that through to students in higher charges for meal plans.”
Other schools in the West Coast Conference (WCC), including the University of San Francisco, Loyola Marymount University and Pepperdine University, are also facing tuition increases ranging from 3.9% to 6%.
“I would say [that compared to] our peer private institutions in the Pacific Northwest, [...] the Holy Cross schools [...] and the West Coast Conference athletic schools, [...] we have always been right at the median in terms of gross price,” Barger said.
For students who plan on taking summer courses, the University is reducing summer tuition costs from $1100 to $950 a credit hour.
The summer tuition decrease is a part of a larger effort to increase summer course accessibility, according to University Provost David Mengel.
“We really do want to make sure we’re helping students progress in their degree,” Mengel said. “That's everything from [students wanting] to retake a course and earn a better grade, or they’re earning a second major or minor and this is a good way to advance. Or maybe they’ve changed majors and this is a way they want to go further.”
The University also plans on increasing course accessibility by offering more summer classes online.
While the number of online courses is set to increase, the University will be decreasing the overall number of summer courses offered.
“We will offer a fewer overall number of courses and we expect that will mean the enrollment size will be more like 10 students a class on average, instead of the past which was more like five students per course on average,” Mengel said.
Additionally, there are no new scholarships for summer enrollment, according to Mengel.
More information on the University’s tuition and cost of attendance can be found here.
Tiffany Marquez-Escobar is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at marqueze25@up.edu.
Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at kuroiwal26@up.edu.
