This idea has been kicking around for a few years, and was most recently presented to the Trustees at their Nebraska game home meeting. Saul Hubbard has an extensive story with many quotes in the RG here.
This idea has been kicking around for a few years, and was most recently presented to the Trustees at their Nebraska game home meeting. Saul Hubbard has an extensive story with many quotes in the RG here.
Low-income Oregonians need not apply. We don’t need your kind of diversity here.
Read the story. It explains some of UO’s extensive and accelerating efforts to expand access for low-income Oregonians.
It doesn’t really help to bring more mediocre students from CA to continue to dilute the quality of education for OR students. I get the funding model but the quality of education continues to decline regardless of how many award winning researchers you buy. They don’t actually teach classes and most of them aren’t particularly good at it anyway. At some point the quality will become so bad that the whole point of the thing will really be questionable. I often wonder if we have already reached this point. OR would be fare better off investing in places like LCC and improving the quality of education at UO while shrinking the campus and admin overhead. This is the saddest part I think about this place. I feel quite sad for the new students and their families when I walk around this campus. I feel like the bloated mgt. has decided to enrich themselves and continue to prop up an unsustainable model rather then make decisions to ensure quality education outcomes for students.
Wow, and I didn’t even write that …
Expanding UO by increasing out of state enrolment is going to be a bad move for this institution in the long run. I understand the need for more cash, but the university is here to serve the state and its people first. Out of state students already get poor value for their $$$.
Many of Oregon’s (and the nation’s) best and brightest prefer universities with strong applied science programs. Just look at OSU and PSU. UO is going in the opposite direction, when it should be providing a mix of programs.
You seem to be confused about what direction UO is moving in. Please read about UO’s new $500M “Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact”, i.e. applied science, here: https://accelerate.uoregon.edu/
The Knight Campus is a step in the right direction and I support this endeavor. However, it is my understanding that it will enroll a very small amount of undergraduates and is primarily a research endeavor.
You’re right, that’s the focus for now. Sorry for being snappish.
This is all just preparation for UO enrolling a majority of out of state students. For a few years UO has been obsessed with having mostly Oregonians on campus, and now it is bracing you for the big change. UO will no longer primarily be educating Oregonians.
It’s a form of bait-and-switch. The UO was established as a public university by the people of the state for the education of students from the state. Public funds (supplemented with some private gifts) developed the campus and built the original infrastructure. Now those gifts from the people of Oregon are being used to attract out-of-state students, while in-state tuition continues to skyrocket. We’re a private university in all but name.
Problem is, as you surely know, the people of the state of Oregon not enrolled at the university “decided” to essentially stop funding us. So, yeah, they paid for the land and they paid for the buildings (and more) but they no longer pay much of our operating costs, the costs to get students to this land and into those buildings and in front of working teachers. We lose money for each Oregon student we educate (or it is close) because the state declines to provide ongoing and adequate, and not merely historic, investments. So, my suggestion is that people upset about a growing reliance on out-of-state students, direct your ire appropriately at voters and the legislature they elect. Or find faculty members and administrators and staff willing to work for less in order to reduce the pressure for new sources of revenue. Or keep a higher percentage of in-state students but offer them ever worse facilities and opportunities. We are a private university in all but name, well, except for the fact that an in-state student is not going to find a private school for $12K a year in tuition. This is upsetting, obviously, but I hear a whole lot of bellyaching and precious few viable recommendations other than attracting students that pay more in tuition and provide the resources to keep the ship afloat. Beating one’s chest and offering lamentations is no substitute for a plan. It is cheap emotionalism.
Oregon could do a lot better with higher ed funding. But if I’m reading this data right, the state this biennium is providing as much money per student (corrected for inflation) as it did in 2001-2003 ( http://www.oregon.gov/highered/research/Pages/funding-data.aspx ). Looks like state support per-student has been flat, not declining, over that time. But at the same time UO operating costs have shot up far faster than inflation (uomatters–maybe you can help here with total operating budget figures over time — I quickly came up with an increase of about 55% in non-adjusted dollars since 2010). Much of the increase is due to administrative bloat. The “viable recommendations” you’re looking for need to start with greater in-house efficiency, reduced administrative budgets, and a rededication to the needs of Oregonians the UO supposedly serves.
Feel free to develop and share your proposal to address administrative bloat, and be sure to share your numbers, and name those administrators you would cut that would produce revenue comparable to what the new batch of out-of-staters will yield. I would note I did identify cutting salaries of administrators as one possible solution, but only in the abstract because I personally do not think there is a plan that will accomplish that, at least in the near term. We could also cut faculty salaries or staff positions. I am going to go out on a limb and predict you are faculty or staff. This is why as much as I am sympathetic to this view, I don’t view it as as much more than empty sloganeering. My time horizon, by the way, goes back to pre-Measure 5 days, so my historic comparison of state-level funding is not the anemic, flat levels of the past decade.
I wonder how our operating costs and numbers of out-of-state students compare with OSU?