A Parent’s Complete Guide to Loyola Marymount University (2026-2027)

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Jump to

• What is the one thing every Loyola Marymount University parent needs to know before move-in?
• Quick Facts for Loyola Marymount University Families
• A Note on the Jesuit Mission and Los Angeles
• How do parents get to Loyola Marymount University? Travel guide from Los Angeles International Airport
• What do parents need to know about Loyola Marymount University move-in day 2026?
• The Residence Halls: Where Your Student Might Live
• How much does Loyola Marymount University cost? Tuition, financial aid, and scholarships for 2026-27
• Los Angeles: What Parents Need to Know
• When is Loyola Marymount University Family Weekend 2026 and how do parents plan for it?
• How can parents support their Loyola Marymount University student’s mental health?
• Who do Loyola Marymount University parents contact? Essential numbers and websites for families
• LMU’s Academic Strengths
• What is Loyola Marymount University’s graduation rate?
• Academic Calendar
• What to Pack for Loyola Marymount University

What is the one thing every Loyola Marymount University parent needs to know before move-in?

There is a spot on the Loyola Marymount University campus where you can stand and look west over the Pacific Ocean, watch container ships moving through the shipping lanes toward the Port of Los Angeles, and feel, for a moment, like this might be the most beautiful college campus in the country.

That spot is called the Bluff, and it is not a marketing phrase. The campus sits on a genuine geographical bluff above Playa del Rey and Marina del Rey, perched over the coastline on the southwestern edge of Los Angeles. The views are extraordinary, and they do not diminish after the first week of classes. Your student will walk past them every day.

That physical reality shapes almost everything about what it means to attend LMU. The ocean is close. The beach is close. The weather is close to perfect for the majority of the academic year. But the operative parent reality is this: Loyola Marymount University is a private Jesuit Catholic university of approximately 7,000 undergraduates sitting at the edge of one of the largest, most expensive, and most logistically complex cities in the United States. The same city that produces that extraordinary bluff view also produces gridlocked freeways, a cost of living that will affect every off-campus decision your student makes, and an ambient culture shaped by the entertainment and media industries in ways that create both tremendous opportunity and a specific kind of competitive pressure.

Many students choose LMU because they want proximity to Hollywood. The School of Film and Television at LMU is one of the best in the country, and its alumni working in major studios, networks, and agencies are not a vague alumni network claim but a genuinely active professional pipeline. Students arrive hoping to intern at a production company, to meet working directors and writers through their professors, to be five miles from Universal Studios and fifteen miles from Netflix’s Sunset Bronson facility. That aspiration is legitimate and well-founded. LMU delivers on it, particularly for students who arrive ready to take initiative. But it is worth understanding before your student begins that Los Angeles is not a city that rewards passivity, and the entertainment industry specifically operates on relationships, persistence, and a tolerance for rejection that takes time to develop.

LMU’s Jesuit identity is the counterweight to that ambient industry pressure, and it is one of the things that distinguishes LMU from the other film and entertainment-adjacent institutions in Los Angeles. The Jesuit concept of cura personalis, care of the whole person, shapes how residential life operates, how faculty engage with students, and how the campus ministry and service programs function alongside the professional ambition that many students bring to campus. LMU is not simply a pre-Hollywood training program with dormitories. It is a serious liberal arts university within the Jesuit tradition, one that requires all students to complete a core curriculum grounded in philosophy, theology, writing, and ethical reasoning. Students who came for the film school find themselves thinking seriously about ethics and justice in ways they did not anticipate. That is by design.

The logistical reality that every parent needs to understand before move-in: LAX is approximately five miles from campus. In most cities, five miles would mean fifteen minutes. In Los Angeles, five miles from LAX can mean thirty to forty-five minutes, and during peak traffic hours it can take longer. The 405 freeway, which runs directly between the airport and the campus area, is one of the most congested stretches of road in the country. Everything in Los Angeles takes longer than it looks on a map. That applies to picking up your student from the airport, to visiting campus from a hotel in Santa Monica or downtown, and to your student getting anywhere in the city by surface roads. Plan with generous time buffers. Build in extra margin for every travel segment. The city rewards patience and punishes rigid schedules.

Quick Facts for Loyola Marymount University Families

A Note on the Jesuit Mission and Los Angeles

Loyola Marymount University is named for two traditions that have shaped Jesuit higher education for centuries: the Society of Jesus, founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola, and the Marymount institutions, which brought a separate Catholic educational tradition into the university’s formation.

The result is an institution that takes its Jesuit mission seriously while operating in one of the most secular and industry-driven cities in the world. That tension is productive rather than contradictory. The Jesuit emphasis on examining one’s motivations, on service to others, and on engaging the world as it actually is, rather than retreating from it, is well suited to Los Angeles.

The physical campus reflects that spirit. The Sunken Garden, a formal terraced space at the heart of campus, is designed as a place of reflection and gathering. The architecture of the older campus buildings draws on Mission Revival style, with red-tiled roofs and arched colonnades that create an aesthetic coherence unusual in a city where the built environment tends toward maximalism and change. Students who need a moment away from the ambient noise of Hollywood ambition and Los Angeles traffic can find it on their own campus in a way that is harder to achieve at urban institutions without this kind of intentionally designed breathing room.

The LMU Lions athletic identity brings a different energy. LMU competes in the West Coast Conference alongside Gonzaga, Santa Clara, and other Jesuit institutions, and the Lions basketball program generates genuine campus enthusiasm. “Lion Up” is the campus’s rallying phrase, and it functions as a real expression of community pride rather than a marketing slogan. Athletic events, particularly basketball games at the Gersten Pavilion, give students a shared reason to show up and cheer together, which matters more than it might seem for a commuter-adjacent urban campus where students could easily scatter into the city on weekends.

The School of Film and Television deserves particular mention as a defining feature of LMU’s identity and reputation. It is consistently ranked among the top film schools in the United States, alongside USC and UCLA, and its alumni include working professionals across every sector of the industry. What distinguishes LMU’s program from some of its larger-institution competitors is the degree of access students have to equipment, to faculty who are active industry professionals, and to each other across disciplines. The combination of Jesuit values and Hollywood proximity is not an accident of geography. LMU made a deliberate institutional commitment to becoming a serious film and media school while maintaining the whole-person educational mission that defines Jesuit higher education. Students who come to LMU understanding both of those commitments will make the most of what the university offers.

How do parents get to Loyola Marymount University? Travel guide from Los Angeles International Airport

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is the primary gateway for most families visiting LMU, and its five-mile proximity to campus sounds more convenient than it often is.

Uber and Lyft from LAX to campus typically takes twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on the time of day, the terminal, and whether you are traveling during peak commute hours. Friday afternoons and Sunday evenings are reliably difficult. If you are arriving on a move-in weekend or for Family Weekend, budget at least ninety minutes from wheels-down to your student’s residence hall, accounting for deplaning, baggage claim, and the ride itself. LAX is also one of the busiest airports in the country, and the pickup and drop-off zones operate under active construction and reconfiguration as of 2026. Allow time for confusion.

LAX recently opened the Automated People Mover, an elevated train that connects the terminals to a central transportation hub. From there, connections to the Metro C Line (formerly the Green Line) are available, though the Metro C Line does not serve the LMU campus directly. Metro access for off-campus activities is useful once your student is settled and familiar with the system, but it is not a practical route from the airport to campus. For domestic travel, some families strongly prefer Bob Hope Airport in Burbank (BUR), located approximately thirty-five miles north of campus. Burbank is smaller, faster to move through, and substantially less stressful than LAX. The trade-off is that Burbank serves fewer airlines and fewer routes, so it works best for families flying from major hubs on Southwest, United, or Alaska. Long Beach Airport (LGB), approximately thirty miles southeast of campus, is another regional option with similar trade-offs.

Driving in Los Angeles requires understanding three freeways: the 405, the 10, and the 105. The campus sits near the intersection of all three. The 405 is the primary north-south corridor and is congested for much of every weekday. The 10 (the Santa Monica Freeway) runs east-west and connects downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, with exits serving the campus area. The 105 connects LAX to the 405 interchange just south of campus. Campus parking operates on a permit system, and permits are available to students with registered vehicles, though the university and the surrounding neighborhood are generally walkable for daily campus life. A car is very useful for exploring Los Angeles, for grocery runs, and for any off-campus opportunity that arises in the entertainment industry, but students who do not have cars on campus are not at a disadvantage for day-to-day life. The LMU campus shuttle also connects to nearby off-campus areas, providing additional transportation options for students without vehicles.

What do parents need to know about Loyola Marymount University move-in day 2026?

LMU’s fall semester typically begins in late August, and move-in day for freshmen arrives at the height of the Los Angeles summer. August weather in the Playa del Rey area is warm and often sunny, with daytime temperatures in the low to mid-eighties.

One characteristic Los Angeles coastal pattern to know about: the marine layer, a low coastal fog, often rolls in from the ocean overnight and lingers through the morning hours. By midday it has usually burned off, leaving clear skies and warm sunshine. If your student wakes up on move-in morning and the sky looks grey and overcast, this is normal and temporary. Dress in layers for the morning hours and plan for warm afternoon temperatures when you are carrying boxes and assembling furniture.

The university coordinates move-in through assigned arrival windows, which allows residential life staff and LMU’s corps of trained volunteers to staff the unloading zones efficiently. The volunteers, organized through Lion Orientation programming, are enthusiastic and plentiful. Carts are available for moving boxes and bins from the vehicle to the room. The process is designed to minimize the time your car is in the unloading zone, so your most efficient approach is to have the car fully packed and organized before you arrive, and to have your student ready to move while you pull back around if a second trip is needed. The residential life staff are experienced with first-time families and are your best resource for any question that comes up during move-in.

Traffic is the variable that most parents underestimate on move-in day. The campus is in a neighborhood that already has LAX-adjacent traffic patterns, and hundreds of vehicles arriving simultaneously for move-in adds to that load. Whatever time you plan to arrive, add a forty-five-minute buffer. If you are driving from a hotel in El Segundo, Marina del Rey, or Santa Monica, use the navigation app on your phone rather than a memorized route, because the app will route around the worst backups in real time. Patience on move-in day is the single most useful thing you can bring.

Practical tips for LMU move-in day:

• Confirm your assigned arrival window in advance and honor it. The system works only when families arrive in their window.
• Pack your car the night before so you are not loading it in the hotel parking lot on move-in morning.
• Bring cash and a credit card. Meals near campus on move-in day are busy, and some local food trucks operate cash-only.
• Hydrate. August in Los Angeles is warm, and carrying boxes is physical work.
• Bring a small toolkit with a screwdriver, an Allen wrench, and a power strip. Furniture assembly and outlet access are common first-room tasks.
• Say goodbye before you are emotionally ready, not after. Extended goodbyes in the hallway are harder on everyone.

The Residence Halls: Where Your Student Might Live

LMU’s residential community is organized around a cluster of halls primarily serving freshmen and sophomores, with apartment-style options for upperclassmen who remain on campus. The residential experience is central to the LMU first-year design, and the university structures programming and community-building around the halls as a deliberate pedagogical choice.

Dons Hall is one of the traditional freshman halls, with double rooms and strong community programming organized through resident advisors and campus ministry connections. The name reflects a historical institutional identity, and the hall’s community culture tends toward the social and engaged. Leavey Hall is a popular freshman assignment, situated centrally within the residential campus, and it tends to generate the tight-knit hall communities that many LMU freshmen describe when they reflect on their first year. Rosecrans Hall is part of the traditional halls cluster and is a common freshman assignment, with a layout and programming structure similar to Leavey.

Hannon Hall draws its name from the Hannon Library and sits near the academic core of campus, making it a convenient option for students who spend significant time in the library and academic buildings during the week. Hathaway Hall serves primarily upperclassmen and offers a somewhat more independent residential experience than the heavily programmed freshman halls. For upperclassmen who remain on campus, The Bluff Apartments are the residential option that most directly reflects the campus’s geographical identity. These apartment-style units carry the views and proximity to the ocean that define the campus’s character, and they represent the most sought-after on-campus housing for students beyond their sophomore year. Rains Apartments and Whelan Hall provide additional upperclassman housing options with greater independence and more apartment-style living than the traditional residence halls.

LMU guarantees housing for freshmen and sophomores, which gives families confidence in housing security for the first two years. After sophomore year, the housing picture changes substantially. Many LMU students move off campus into the surrounding neighborhoods: Playa del Rey, Westchester, El Segundo, and Culver City are the most common destinations, each offering varying distances from campus and varying price points. Los Angeles off-campus rents are among the highest in the country. A two-bedroom apartment in Westchester or Culver City typically runs $2,800 to $4,000 per month or more, shared among roommates. Parents of students approaching the end of sophomore year should begin those budget conversations early, because the transition from guaranteed on-campus housing to the Los Angeles rental market is a significant financial planning event.

How much does Loyola Marymount University cost? Tuition, financial aid, and scholarships for 2026-27

LMU is a private university in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and the full cost of attendance reflects both realities. Families should build their budget around the complete picture rather than tuition alone.

LMU is not a need-blind institution, meaning demonstrated financial need is a factor in admissions decisions. However, the university does meet significant need for admitted students and offers a range of merit scholarships that can make a meaningful difference in the total cost. The Trustee Scholar Award is LMU’s most prestigious merit scholarship, awarded to a small cohort of students who demonstrate exceptional academic achievement and leadership. The Presidential Scholarship recognizes strong academic performers across a broader applicant pool. The Ignatian Scholarship is particularly meaningful for families who appreciate the Jesuit mission: it is awarded to students who demonstrate a commitment to service, leadership, and the values that define the LMU community, and it reflects the institution’s belief that the qualities Ignatius valued are worth supporting financially.

Completing both the FAFSA and the CSS Profile is essential for LMU financial aid consideration. The CSS Profile provides a more detailed picture of family finances than the FAFSA alone, and many private universities, including LMU, require it to process institutional aid. Submit both as early as possible after October 1 of the application year. Families should also research California state aid programs, including the Cal Grant, which can provide meaningful support for California residents attending private institutions in the state. If you have a funding gap after institutional and state aid, private student loan comparison can help you identify competitive rates before committing to any particular lender.

FAFSA guide for LMU families

Full college cost planning guide

Los Angeles: What Parents Need to Know

Los Angeles as a city for a college student is genuinely unlike any other environment in American higher education. It is not a college town in any conventional sense.

The city does not pause for semesters, does not organize its rhythms around the academic calendar, and does not offer the concentrated campus-centered social life that characterizes smaller college towns or even urban universities in dense pedestrian neighborhoods. What it offers instead is access: to industry, to culture, to geography, and to a kind of ambition that students from anywhere in the country can plug into if they know how to work in it. Parents who understand this before their student arrives will be much better positioned to interpret the experience their student is having.

The Westchester neighborhood surrounding LMU’s campus is an important piece of context. Westchester is primarily a quiet, residential neighborhood with single-family homes, a main commercial strip along Sepulveda Boulevard, and a suburban character that surprises many students who expected a more energetic urban environment immediately around campus. The LMU campus itself supplies most of the daily life that students need, and the surrounding neighborhood is safe and accessible without requiring a car for daily errands. Marina del Rey and Playa del Rey, immediately adjacent to campus, bring the waterfront dimension that makes LMU’s immediate geography genuinely appealing: the Marina is lined with restaurants, the harbor is active with sailboats and kayaks, and the beaches at Playa del Rey are among the most accessible in the Los Angeles basin.

For parent visits, the area around campus offers some excellent options. Cafe del Rey in Marina del Rey is a waterfront restaurant well suited for a special dinner with your student, with views of the marina and a menu that reflects California coastal dining at its best. Playa Provisions, closer to the beach and just minutes from campus, is an excellent choice for brunch and is casual enough that your student will be comfortable. Venice Beach is approximately twenty minutes from campus, offering the boardwalk, Abbot Kinney Boulevard (a walkable strip of independent shops and restaurants), and the Muscle Beach outdoor gym that has been a Venice landmark for decades. Santa Monica is also roughly twenty minutes away. Third Street Promenade is a reliable parent-visit afternoon, with outdoor dining, shopping, and the Palisades Park bluffs above the beach. Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica and Chez Mimi in Santa Monica are excellent for a more elevated dinner if you want something memorable.

For cultural activities beyond the beach, the Getty Center is approximately twenty minutes from campus and is free to the public (parking is charged). The permanent collection is world-class, the architecture by Richard Meier is extraordinary, and the gardens are among the best designed public spaces in Los Angeles. The Farmers Market and The Grove on Fairfax, roughly thirty minutes from campus, represent an essential Los Angeles experience for families who have not been before. The Farmers Market has been operating since 1934 and is a genuine piece of the city’s history; The Grove adjacent to it is a more contemporary outdoor shopping and dining destination.

For practical student living, Ralphs and Vons are the standard California grocery chains and both have locations within a few miles of campus. The medical system parents should know is Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, one of the preeminent hospital systems in Los Angeles, which serves as the major hospital resource for serious medical needs. Urgent care options are scattered throughout the Westchester and Culver City areas. One piece of weather advice worth passing on: students from cold climates routinely underestimate Los Angeles coastal weather in the first weeks of school. The daytime temperatures in August and September are warm, but coastal evenings can be genuinely cool, and the marine layer in the mornings can feel raw if you are not dressed for it. A light jacket or sweatshirt is a year-round useful item on the LMU campus, not just a seasonal one.

When is Loyola Marymount University Family Weekend 2026 and how do parents plan for it?

LMU Family Weekend is typically held in November, organized through the Office of Student Affairs, and it is the anchor event of the campus visit calendar for families who cannot visit frequently during the year.

The programming is designed to give parents a genuine window into campus life rather than a promotional presentation, with campus tours, academic showcases, athletic events, and opportunities to connect with staff and faculty. The Office of Student Affairs coordinates the schedule, and registration typically opens several weeks in advance. If Family Weekend is on your calendar, hotel booking should happen early, because the Marina del Rey and El Segundo areas fill up quickly when campus events draw families from across the country.

Campus life at LMU is shaped significantly by its physical setting in ways that are hard to replicate at other institutions. The beach proximity makes weekends genuinely different from what students experience at landlocked campuses. Volleyball at Dockweiler State Beach, surfing at El Porto in Manhattan Beach, coastal runs along the bike path that stretches from Santa Monica to Palos Verdes: these are not unusual activities for LMU students on a Saturday morning. The outdoor culture is woven into daily student life in a way that functions as a genuine mental health resource and a source of community, particularly for students who share athletic or recreational interests. Parents of students who thrive outdoors will find that LMU’s geography supports that part of their student’s life unusually well.

The LMU Lions basketball team plays its home games at the Gersten Pavilion, and West Coast Conference basketball brings the Lions into competition with Gonzaga, Santa Clara, University of San Diego, and other institutions where the conference alignment carries a Jesuit identity for most members. Home basketball games are one of the primary gathering points for campus community outside the residence halls. For families visiting during the basketball season, attending a game at the Gersten Pavilion is a genuine way to experience the campus at its most collectively enthusiastic. The School of Film and Television also holds screenings and student film festivals throughout the academic year, which families can sometimes attend depending on timing. These screenings are among the more distinctive campus experiences available at LMU, and they reflect the school’s seriousness about its creative mission in a concrete, visible way.

For hotel logistics, the Marina del Rey area is the most convenient cluster for family visits. The Marina del Rey Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey are both within ten minutes of campus and offer waterfront settings that make the stay part of the Los Angeles experience rather than simply a logistical necessity. For families who want more inventory at lower price points, the El Segundo hotel corridor adjacent to LAX is five to ten minutes from campus and offers a wide range of options from major chains. El Segundo is not a destination neighborhood, but it is efficient and well-supplied for a two-night parent visit.

How can parents support their Loyola Marymount University student’s mental health?

Los Angeles creates a specific kind of pressure for students who arrived partly because of its entertainment industry proximity. The ambient culture of the city, particularly in the film and media world, runs on comparison.

Students watch their classmates announce internships, film festival selections, and industry meetings on social media, and the timeline of professional success in Hollywood is highly variable and often invisible until it suddenly is not. Students who expected to be on a clear track toward their goals by the end of sophomore year sometimes find that the track is less linear than they imagined, and that disparity between expectation and reality can generate anxiety that accumulates if it goes unaddressed.

LMU’s Counseling and Psychological Services office (CAPS) is the primary mental health resource on campus. CAPS offers individual counseling, group therapy, and crisis support services, and is staffed by licensed clinicians. Let’s Talk is a drop-in consultation model that lowers the barrier to initial help-seeking: students can have a brief, informal conversation with a counselor without scheduling a formal appointment, which is particularly valuable for students who are uncertain whether what they are experiencing rises to the level of needing formal support. LMU also uses telehealth platforms that can serve as a bridge for students who need more appointment availability than the on-campus counseling center can provide, particularly during peak demand periods like midterms and finals.

The Jesuit pastoral care infrastructure is an underused resource for many students. Campus Ministry at LMU offers not only religious programming but Ignatian spiritual direction, which is a structured reflective practice that does not require formal religious commitment to engage with productively. Students who are not Catholic, and students who arrived at LMU primarily for its academic and professional programs, sometimes discover in Ignatian spiritual direction a framework for thinking about their goals, their values, and their sense of purpose that is genuinely useful in a city that can make those questions feel urgent. The beach and the outdoor access remain the most immediate, available, and underappreciated mental health resource on campus. A thirty-minute walk along the Playa del Rey coastline resets something in most people. Encourage your student to use it.

Mental health resources at LMU:

• CAPS: contact via studentaffairs.lmu.edu/caps
• Campus Ministry: contact via lmu.edu/ministry
• Crisis Line: call or text 988
• Emergency: contact via lmu.edu/publicsafety

Who do Loyola Marymount University parents contact? Essential numbers and websites for families

Verify all phone numbers and URLs at lmu.edu before using, as contact information is subject to change.

• Parent and Family Programs: contact via lmu.edu/parents
• Dean of Students: contact via studentaffairs.lmu.edu
• Residence Life: contact via lmu.edu/housing
• Financial Aid: contact via lmu.edu/financialaid
• Student Psychological Services (CAPS): contact via studentaffairs.lmu.edu/caps
• Campus Ministry: contact via lmu.edu/ministry
• Public Safety (non-emergency): contact via lmu.edu/publicsafety
• Registrar: contact via lmu.edu/registrar
• Emergency: 911

LMU’s Academic Strengths

LMU’s academic identity is built around a genuine breadth of strong programs anchored by one of the most distinguished film schools in the country.

The School of Film and Television is consistently ranked among the top five film schools in the United States, and that ranking reflects something real: the faculty are active industry professionals, the facilities are legitimate production resources, and the alumni network in Hollywood is extensive and unusually accessible for students who take initiative. The career pipeline into Disney, Warner Bros., Netflix, Blumhouse, and the full range of studios, streamlines, and production companies that define contemporary entertainment is unusually strong for a university of LMU’s size. That is not because of geography alone, though the five-mile distance from major studios matters. It is because the institution has made a sustained commitment to building an industry-connected program within a liberal arts framework.

The Loyola Law School, on a separate campus in downtown Los Angeles, is one of the strongest law schools in the West and has a particularly strong reputation in entertainment law, public interest law, and litigation. For undergraduates at LMU who are considering law school, the proximity of Loyola Law School to the undergraduate campus is an asset worth understanding early, including opportunities for undergraduate research and the prelaw advising infrastructure that LMU provides. The College of Business Administration offers programs in finance, entrepreneurship, and entertainment business that are well aligned with the industries most represented in the Los Angeles economy. The Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering includes bioengineering, civil engineering, and computer science programs that benefit from Los Angeles’s strong technology and health sciences industries. The Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts houses philosophy, English, political science, and the humanities programs that form the backbone of the Jesuit core curriculum.

Every LMU student, regardless of major, completes a core curriculum derived from the Jesuit educational tradition. The core includes courses in philosophy, theology, ethics, writing, the social sciences, and the arts, with the explicit goal of producing graduates who can think across disciplines, communicate clearly, and engage the world with ethical seriousness. Students who arrive at LMU focused entirely on their major sometimes find the core requirements initially frustrating. Most of them, by the time they graduate, describe the core as one of the more formative parts of their education. That arc is not accidental.

You Are a Lion Family Now

When your student walked onto that bluff for the first time, whether during an admitted students day or on move-in morning with the marine layer still burning off over the Pacific, something shifted in what they understood was possible for them. The ocean to the west, the city sprawling north and east in every direction, the Hollywood Hills visible on clear days: the geography of LMU communicates ambition and possibility in a way that is hard to replicate anywhere else. They chose a university that takes their whole person seriously within one of the most stimulating environments in the world. That combination is rare.

The Jesuit mission at LMU is not window dressing. It is the reason that a student who arrived planning to write screenplays finds herself thinking seriously about justice and service by the end of sophomore year. It is the reason that the faculty member your student will remember in twenty years was also asking them hard questions about who they want to be, not just what they want to produce. Cura personalis means that the university’s investment in your student is not transactional. It extends to their formation as a person, their capacity for reflection, and their readiness to do work in the world that matters.

Los Angeles will challenge your student in ways that are hard to predict. The city is enormous, the industry is competitive, the cost of living is real, and the social comparison that comes with a campus full of ambitious young people in proximity to Hollywood is a genuine pressure. The Jesuit framework, the campus community, the service programs, the bluff views, and the Pacific Ocean below them are all resources your student can draw on when those challenges arrive. Go Lions.

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Last updated: May 2026. Tuition, dates, and policies subject to change. Verify all time-sensitive information at lmu.edu and lmu.edu/parents.