The University of Indianapolis announced via an email from University President Tanuja Singh that tuition and fees would increase by 3% for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year.
Tuition was increased by 3% for the current 2024-25 academic year, according to previous reporting by “The Reflector.” Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration Rick Graycarek said the 3% increase is to ensure UIndy can continue to provide services to students.
“Whenever we evaluate what the tuition-rate change should be for the next year, affordability is always top of mind, and then secondly, we have to make sure that we’re providing, as an institution, all students with a good or great experience of being here and that means faculty,” Graycarek said. “That means making sure the campus is safe and secure, and we’ve done lots of things in those spaces.”
UIndy continues to expand programs under Singh’s leadership, according to her bio on the president’s webpage. UIndy Online, Sease Institute and Women’s Executive Leadership Institute are all additions under Singh. She said the expansion of programs is strategic due to the rise of lifelong learning, and believes the programs will have a positive impact on the university’s financial status.
For the 2022-23 academic year, the university reported a negative net income of more than $7.6 million on the IRS 990 form, according to ProPublica. In the prior year, the university reported a negative net income of over $2.6 million. Despite this, Singh is not worried about where the university stands financially.
“The university is in a significantly stronger position today than, of course, those previous numbers indicate,” Singh said. “The way you mitigate those challenges is to ensure that ultimately the students that come here, we retain them, we graduate them and that the tuition revenue and our expenses in other areas where we have control, that they are all directed towards making sure that the students are being successful.”
The university has seen positive changes in the 2023-24 fiscal year, which will be reflected in the newest Form 990 releasing in June, Graycarek added. University spending accumulated prior to Singh’s arrival, Graycarek said, but those investments have since turned around.
UIndy currently ranks 16th out of 67 for the highest in-state tuition for universities in Indiana, according to CollegeSimply, which provides college rankings by using data from the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics. UIndy’s $36,504 tuition for the 2025-26 academic year puts UIndy between Manchester University and Anderson University.
“There’s the sticker price,” Graycarek said. “I always laugh at Kohl’s because nobody ever pays full price at Kohl’s. It’s the same thing here. People don’t pay the full price.”
Graycarek said around 99% of UIndy students receive some kind of financial aid, the outliers that typically do not get aid are international students. UIndy’s financial aid website cites the number from the 2022-23 academic year with “Common Data Set” as the source. For the freshman class for the 2024-25 academic year, students in need of financial aid were typically offered around $30,000 of the roughly $37,000 full tuition price at UIndy for an academic year, Graycarek said. This is also mirrored on UIndy’s financial aid site. There are also costs associated with maintaining staff at the university.
“Any time you replace faculty, the new faculty coming in, because of the cost we are paying them, their salaries tend to be a little higher,” Singh said. “We are also investing in support services, for example, we just hired and created a new position in our Professional Edge Center, somebody whose entire job is directed [at] working with companies, government and not-for-profits to make opportunities available for our students for experiential learning, for job opportunities once they graduate and working with companies to bring all those experiences inside.”
In comparison to other private universities, Singh maintained UIndy’s real price is more competitive than the published full tuition price. More information regarding cost for the 2025-26 school year is available on UIndy’s financial aid homepage.
