On Oct. 30, UVA’s Board of Visitors approved another round of housing and dining increases. Next fall, a first-year living on Grounds with the unlimited meal plan will pay $16,870, about $800 more than this year. It is the fifth straight year of housing and dining increases each around 5%.
The same day, UVA’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) condemned the vote. Its statement, “In Response to Increasing Student Cost,” gets the diagnosis right: The Board keeps pushing costs onto students and families, “increasing costs every year on those who already can’t shoulder them,” while UVA holds large resources it doesn’t use to hold prices down.
But the statement never attempts to answer the question it raises: Why do students keep paying more? UVA’s own records answer it. So did the explanation UVA’s chief operating officer gave the Board just before it voted to approve the increases.
“We seek simply to cover our costs”
Jennifer “J.J.” Davis, UVA’s Executive Vice President and COO, glibly offered to provide the reason for the price increases. “We seek simply to cover our costs,” she told the Board. “These are not profit ventures.”
Unfortunately, that explanation is inherently disingenuous. The costs Davis referred to did not just happen to UVA. Each one traces back to choices the Board or the administration made: to move dorm-life costs onto students’ rent, to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars for new dormitory construction and repay the borrowing costs from that rent, and to keep growing an ever-expanding administration. Referring to “covering costs” is a meaningless explanation to the extent that it is not directly related to the students and their families who are paying for them. It is particularly unfair to keep piling these unrelated costs onto families at the same time when tuition and other student costs keep rising too.
Four years ago, UVA changed who pays for dorm life
For years, UVA paid for Residence Life out of its academic budget (what UVA calls “educational and general” funds), the same pot of tuition and state money that pays for classes.
In December 2022, the administration asked the Board to move those costs onto students’ housing bills, one-fifth at a time over five years, until none of it came from the academic budget. The Board agreed. Housing rose 5.5% that year and has stayed near 5% since. On Oct. 30, Davis put a figure on it: “about $550,000 annually of residential life costs,” added each year. “This was a decision the board made four years ago,” she said.
Yet in a 2024 report to the state, UVA said folding residence life into housing would save about $600,000 a year, savings that would “prevent or offset increases in student costs/fees.” The opposite happened. Housing rose 5.5% that year and 5.5% again the next, and tuition continued to increase.
The public can’t see what the money that used to pay for dorm life is paying for now. It isn’t in the budget books, which have no line for housing or residence life. By next fall, if $550,000 is added each year, about $2.75 million a year in dorm-life costs will have moved onto student rent. UVA has never published the total, and it has never said where the freed-up academic money went. That is a problem: a public university shifted millions of dollars a year onto students, and the public record can’t show where the money went.
Why are students paying for expansion?
In December 2024, the Board approved new apartment-style dorms in the Ivy Corridor: about 780 beds, at a cost of $150 million to $160 million, all of it borrowed. The committee’s slides said who would pay it back: “Debt serviced through housing and dining revenues.” By April 2026, UVA’s slides were blunter: the “funding model relies on housing rate increase, as housing rates support debt service.” Construction began in March 2025. The beds open in August 2027.
Davis said the higher rent was the plan from the start. “When we committed to the expansion of upper-class housing, we indicated and outlined for the board in the financial plan that it would require rate increases,” she said. “So a significant portion of the rate increase for this and future years will go to cover the additional 780 beds.”
And more is coming. In June 2026, UVA’s treasurer showed the Finance Committee about $1 billion in future borrowing, including the Ivy Corridor dorms and $149 million for graduate housing at the Darden School.
The new dorms directly further former President Jim Ryan’s 2030 strategic plan, which set a goal to house all first- and second-year students on Grounds. Reaching it will take 2,000 to 2,400 new beds. The students paying the higher rent today, many of whom will graduate before the new buildings open, are paying down debt for a former president’s plan.
Why are students responsible for that debt? A university with one of the largest endowments of any public school chose not to use gifts or endowment money for the buildings its own strategic plan called for. It borrowed every dollar and sent the bill to students and their families, a significant blow to affordability. Even some Board members have balked: Paul Harris voted against the rates in December 2024, and in April 2026 members worried the increases were “gradually making UVA unaffordable for rural and middle-class families,” the minutes record.
Students should not be the only ones paying for a wish-list expansion that was neither necessary, nor in some quarters, considered desirable.
Students pay more while top administrators pay themselves more
While students’ bills have climbed, so has the pay of the people asking them to cover costs. Davis’s own listed salary rose from $629,200 in 2021 to $1,018,000 in 2026, as found in UVA salary data. That is a 62% raise, over years when prices rose about 19%. Davis’s exorbitant increase alone, $388,800, would cover next fall’s housing increase for about 880 students.
Jim Ryan, whose 2030 plan set the dorm expansion in motion, saw his presidential salary rise from $750,000 in 2018 to $912,200 in 2024, The Cavalier Daily reported. He resigned in June 2025. This year UVA lists his salary at $1.21 million, the third-highest at the university, while he takes a paid sabbatical he earned as president. When he returns to teaching, his contract sets his law school pay at 75% of his presidential salary, about $825,000 by one account. The average UVA faculty member makes $144,240.
They aren’t alone. Outside the medical school, from fall 2013 to fall 2024, UVA’s management and business-operations staff grew from 958 to 2,323, up 142%, according to UVA’s own federal reports. Instructional staff grew 31%, and the student body 13%. Faculty pay trailed inflation over that decade. Management was the only staff group whose pay outpaced it.
UVA’s administration keeps growing, and so do students’ bills. The people at the top keep getting raises far larger than anything faculty experiences, and the same people keep proposing and approving higher costs for students. Housing even pays the central administration for its services: when UVA began moving dorm life onto rent, it listed “allocated University services” among the costs the increase would cover. Students are mandated to cover costs, and while it unclear what costs are covered, it is clear that the people setting those costs keep covering themselves.
Cut costs first, before making a mockery of affordability
The AAUP is right that students are carrying too much of the University’s financial load. But the answer isn’t to send the same bills to taxpayers. UVA chose to move dorm life onto rent, and it still hasn’t disclosed what replaced the money. It chose to borrow for a former president’s building plan and repay it from student rent. And it chose to keep adding to administrative bloat, while at the same time, the officials who have made these decisions have given themselves exorbitant raises that have impacted student affordability.
It has become clear that affordability is now the issue of the day nationwide. At UVA, affordability should start with UVA spending less, beginning at the administrative level, rather than asking students and families to “cover more costs.”