The Tuition and Fee Advisory Board met on Friday, Nov. 15 in the Johnson Hall conference room to discuss how the University of Oregon plans to grow its number of enrolled students and how the future of the university’s finances shapes up.
To offset growing costs, UO will need more students to enroll, Chief Financial Officer Jamie Moffitt explained, which is one of the key parts of the university’s growth plan.
For each 1% increase in undergraduate tuition, UO’s overall revenue increases, Moffitt said. From resident students, overall revenue increases by about $750K. From nonresidents, that figure amounts to $2.5 million.
Read the Nov. 15 meeting materials here.
To be sure, this calculation, something that Moffitt describes as “sensitivity analysis,” is “very rough math,” Moffitt said. But she explained that big cost drivers can still outweigh these gains in revenue, something that the board will go over in more detail during another public meeting on Friday, Nov. 22.
Among some of the university’s attempts to attract more students include new online courses and master’s degree programs; more scholarship packages; and efforts to secure more funding from the state. Alone, none of these initiatives would be sizable enough “to really get through this period where we see these big PERS increases,” Moffitt said.
When UO offered additional scholarship packages, the number of applicants to UO increased “significantly,” Moffitt said. But this didn’t result in more students enrolling.
The university’s subsequent surveys of students on why they chose to attend other schools told UO that other schools had made better scholarship offers.
“One of the things we found when we were trying to recruit nonresident students is we were not competitive with scholarship packages,” Moffitt said.
The university has also already made sizable budget cuts. Since 2017, Moffitt explained, the university has cut costs from the College of Arts and Sciences ($3.3 million in fiscal year 2017) and some from the administration ($3 million in FY2017), among other places. In total, this amounts to about $22.4 million per fiscal year.
By presenting this non-exhaustive list, Moffitt wished to convey that the university has tried cutting costs. “At some point, you can’t keep cutting and have the same services,” she said.
Moffitt also presented 24 possible future projections of the university’s budget to the board. In the best scenarios, the university would see more nonresident students enroll and reach its goal of recouping the 1,000-some international students it’s lost over the past few years. In the worst scenarios, a confluence of decreased funding from the Oregon State Legislature, increasing costs from labor contracts and a failure to meet the university’s targets of enrolling more nonresident students would be more than painful for UO’s finances.
“It’s very important that the growth initiative be successful,” Moffitt said.
The next TFAB meeting for the fall term will be on Friday, Nov. 22, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the Johnson Hall conference room. Members will talk about what costs are projected to increase in the next school year — the main driver of increasing tuition.
The Daily Emerald will continue to report on the tuition-setting process throughout the year. Questions about tuition? Contact Senior Reporter Ryan Nguyen at [email protected] or Associate News Editor Zack Demars at [email protected].
