To: All Faculty, Other Academic Appointees, Staff and Postdocs
From: Katherine Baicker, Provost, and Ivan Samstein, Enterprise Chief Financial Officer
Subject: Update on University Actions and Budget
Date: September 17, 2025
The University recently announced a set of measures to strengthen our financial position so that we can continue to invest in our core priorities and future opportunities. We are sharing additional information today to make sure that conversations about these topics are grounded in reliable facts. You can find additional information on this FAQ page.
Despite substantial headwinds in the external environment, thanks to the hard work of so many across campus, the University’s financial position is strengthening. The plans developed collaboratively with faculty and University leaders have helped chart a sound path forward.
The University’s debt and deficit:
- The deficit is the gap between expenditures and revenues. The debt is the accumulated amount that the University has borrowed and not yet repaid. These measures tell us about the financial sustainability of the University’s ongoing operations, so it’s helpful to understand how they are changing over time.
- The University’s total debt as of June 30, 2024, was $6.2 billion (or $4.9 billion for the University itself, $1.3 billion for the University of Chicago Medical Center, and $20 million for the Marine Biological Laboratory). Our outstanding debt has been declining as a share of the University’s budget since FY21, dropping from 101% of total operating expenses in FY21 to 82% in FY24. Debt service (the annual expense we pay for debt, including interest) as a share of total operating expenses has also declined from a peak of 5.2% of the University’s budget in FY21 to 4.2% in FY24. These trends are similar for the University alone. This means that a smaller share of our budget is devoted to paying for past borrowing and more is available for other priorities, and we must continue this improvement.
- Most of our debt is fixed-rate with a longer-term horizon, meaning that recent increases in interest rates had little impact on our payments.
- Focusing on the University itself, the deficit for FY24 was $288 million. The University has run budget deficits for many years, driven by a desire to invest in academic eminence, financial aid, security, and our neighborhood. Those investments have paid off in so many ways, but the deficit was never intended to continue indefinitely.
- As part of our plan to ensure financial sustainability, in 2024 we committed to return to balanced budgets within four years. In the first year of the plan, we reduced the budget deficit by about 25% despite the headwinds of federal policy changes.
- All organizations benefit from continuous efforts to improve effectiveness in achieving their mission. Federal actions have added urgency to our efforts to sharpen and focus the use of our resources, allowing us to continue to build and invest in our faculty, students, and mission.
The University’s endowment:
- The University’s endowment was $10.1 billion in FY24 (or $8.7 billion for the University itself, $1.2 billion for the University of Chicago Medical Center, and $99 million for the Marine Biological Laboratory).
- Our endowment sustains our ongoing scholarly and research operations, thanks to generous philanthropy over more than a century. The intentions of those donors are always honored, as dictated both by ethics and law. This means we cannot simply withdraw restricted funds from the endowment to cover current deficits.
- We consistently play a leading role in academic research and compete successfully with universities that have endowments that are multiples of ours, with a focus on actively deploying our endowment income to best support our faculty and students.
- Related to this, the University took a relatively conservative investment position after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, meaning that earnings on the endowment are lower than they would otherwise be during a booming stock market and higher than they would otherwise be during a market downturn. This does mean, though, that the University had lower returns than some peers with less conservative portfolios during the strong markets of 2010–2021. The investment strategy is continuously evaluated and updated, with the University gradually shifting its portfolio based on evolving market opportunities.
- No, the University has not lost money on cryptocurrency.
- The University has invested less than 0.3% of the endowment in start-ups led by UChicago faculty, students, staff, and alumni, to support entrepreneurship and the impact of technologies and ideas developed at the University. These investments are ongoing, with positive returns, and are not large enough to drive broader endowment performance.
The University’s cost of and investment in education and scholarship:
- The University spends substantially more on education than the tuition that it collects. The University maintains extensive educational resources (including faculty, staff, buildings, labs, libraries, etc.) devoted to instruction, advising, career support, and more. Tuition does not cover the full cost of education. For example, in FY24 the University took in a total of $611 million in tuition and fees (net of financial aid), while paying $874 million in academic salaries, plus employee benefits alone.
- The faculty has grown by 20% in the last decade as we have invested in faculty expansion spanning the humanities to the sciences (as well as additional investment last year to ensure that Arts & Humanities faculty salaries remain highly competitive).
- The University has maintained an average class size of 18 students for the last 15 years. Similarly, the College’s low student-faculty ratio of five students per faculty member has been stable for most of the last decade and is a reduction from six students per faculty member in 2010.
- The number and breadth of course offerings and majors continue to expand.
- No, the University is not contemplating substituting ChatGPT for language (or any other) instruction, nor busing students to other schools.
- Thanks in part to ongoing investment, the College is in greater demand than ever, with undergraduate selectivity and yield at all-time highs.
Where to get more information:
- The University’s independently audited financial statement for FY24 (2023–2024) is available here, and the statement for FY25 will be available and posted this fall.
- We will host another installment in our ongoing budget town hall series this fall—date to be announced shortly.
- We encourage you to visit the FAQ page or reach out to your chair, dean, manager, or to email University leaders at budgetandambitions@uchicago.edu if you have additional questions or ideas.
Thank you for your dedication and hard work, which sustain and advance our academic mission.
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