The Daily Emerald’s Corey Hoffman has a good report on enrollment, here:
… According to the Board of Trustees meeting minutes from Sept. 16 and 17, 2,984 out-of-state students were projected to enroll in 2024. The actual enrollment was 2,536 students.
Although the out-of-state numbers are significantly lower than the projected numbers, there is still an increase in out-of-state enrollment from last year. In 2023, the number of enrolled non-resident students was 2,491. …
I can’t help but think those projections were a joke. Looking at pages 65-66 of the Board of Trustees materials (https://trustees.uoregon.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/consolidated-full-board-materials-sept-16-17-2024_final.pdf), the average annual change in non-resident new enrollees was 3.5%. So, of course, they projected growth of 19.8% for this year, perhaps based off of their best years in the past. Makes total sense! And so now that actual growth is only 1.8%, it’s a catastrophe.
I wonder if they believed the Big 10 would draw in a lot more students or if they thought they needed a lot more students to pay for the Big 10.
Since SC, UCLA, and UDub, all our aspirational peers also went to the B1G, and all the rest (except WaZoo and the Beavs) went to Big12, I do not see how they think the move would change anything… Better if they stayed in the PAC and played with The Mountain West teams and the Beavers. However, that was a good football game.
Fell down the rabbit hole…
$110K for a UO degree??? (because it takes 5 years or more to get a degree).
I am not an economist but something tells me somebody may have missed a few key variables in their price elasticity and modeling leading up to this point.
Over at OSU they talk about the change in the political climate around International students and patterns that I do not think UO board docket addressed. (BTW: Even though UO International enrolment has been spiralling too, Man OSU is kicking butt)
https://institutionalresearch.oregonstate.edu/enrollment-and-demographic-reports
(2023 Enrolment Summary Page 5)
I also dug up a few (harder and harder to find) OUS fact Books…
They did not break out International FTF (First Time Full Time Freshmen) but it looks like (and I remember) heady Aughts and Teens where the international enrolment was like the housing prices (it only goes up).
https://www.oit.edu/institutional-research/fact-book
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED545222.pdf
(2013 Page 23)
In any case I noted on the board docket even with the anemic International attendance, that Non-Oregon Resident FTF outnumber Oregonians in every case they show.
https://trustees.uoregon.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/consolidated-full-board-materials-sept-16-17-2024_final.pdf
(Page 66)
(FTE-Full Time Equivalency; FTF-First Time Full Time Freshman)
Also if I read the data correctly using UO IR and OUS Factbook, in 2011 the UO expended ~$645M ($733M in 2019 Dollars) to educate 22,631 FTE (23,389 Fall head count).
I could not find FTE on the UO IR site for 2019; however the fall head count (usually higher than FTE) was 22,615 expending $980M… Even without Covid it seems cost are up… I wonder if the Faculty pay accounts for the ?~$250M more to teach less Hours?
https://ir.uoregon.edu/ & 2010 OUS Factbook for FTE (Above).
A side note on the Board Docket ~ Pages 42-47 Focus on Payroll, but I do not think I saw any breakout where OA Counts or OA FTE are ever sliced with dollars–that would have been interesting. Unrelated, although, I am not a mathematician I did some back of the envelope Calculations and it looks like that for Every OA there is 1.1 Faculty (or It takes One OA to administer 1.1 faculty OR every 11 Faculty could have 10 Bosses) And I saw also from Docket page 45 that averaging (Total Salary/Total Employee FTE) Gave $/FTE: Schools and Colleges & General Admin ~ $83K; Aux ~ $76K; Research & Academic Admin ~ $72K and Student Related ~ $60K ($/FTE)–perhaps a waste to think of it this way especially missing the slicing by OA and Faculty.
And really creating a scholarship to pay for out of state students? Might work fiscally if it is some kind of bait and switch where they pay like $15K then yank the rug out and they get smacked with full freight ($40K+) for the next 4-5 years? I would guess these people will not matriculate to second or third year, so what is going to happen to those millions of remissions (or were they grants)? Again, just a back of the envelope swag, but if the state is paying $13K and Instate tuition is is $13K, full freight cost should be around $22K not $40K… and if that is not the case then the board needs to go back to the state to explain that if the state funding does not increase per FTE then the Tuition cannot stay at its current level.
Time to crawl out of the rabbit hole.
This sounds like about a $15 – $20 million hit this year. It will be really bad if it grows year by year. Will not help to raise faculty salaries.
I wonder why the shortfall (compared to their expectations). Could the protests, encampments, I-5 blockades last srping have had anything to do with it? I haven’t a clue, but it seems plausible.