Note: This article is the second in a series that will examine UO’s trends on admittance, application rates and demographics. Part three will examine the increased international attention on the UO and run in print on Monday. You can read part one here. 
It’s no secret that the University of Oregon has steadily gained more and more national attention over the last few years.
Out of state applications have risen steadily at the UO for the last decade, according to data from Jonathan Jacobs, UO director of enrollment management research. 47 percent of the current student body is nonresident.
While Oregon students’ acceptance rate has seen little change during this rush to become a Duck, the nonresident acceptance rate has dropped substantially – the chances of getting accepted if you’re not an Oregonian have been declining consistently. But out-of-state students continue to apply in droves.
Freshman Mo Kaufer is in many ways an emblematic UO student. The California native is an avid sports fan and volleyball player with strong academics. She applied to 11 schools last year, ten of which were out-of-state.
“I knew that more people applied to California schools each year,” Kaufer said. “I knew people who had been devastated by not getting in when they totally expected to get in. You have to apply to all those schools because honestly it’s a hit or miss.” Her tactic was to avoid the stiff competition in her home state.
 

Meanwhile, the application and acceptance rates among Oregonians have remained stagnant for several years.
The Office of Admissions accepts the Oregon residents first, the international applicants second and then fills in the rest of the freshman class with nonresidents, according to Jim Rawlins, director of admissions. So to keep the entering class at around 50 percent residents, admission for out-of-state and international students is in part determined by how many Oregonians the Office of Admissions believes will attend on a year-to-year basis.
This means that some nonresident applicants who would otherwise be ideal candidates may be turned away.
“As much as we love to accept out-of-state and international students, our first goal is to take in-state students. If that means it’s harder for an out-of-state student to get in, that’s what it means,” Rawlins said.
The strongest and weakest applicants are less affected by the increased interest at the UO — the average non-resident applicants are.
“If you think about the middle of our applicant pool, students who are in that average, those are the ones who are most likely to be impacted the most by (growth in out-of-state applicants),” Rawlins said.
Rawlins said that admissions criteria haven’t changed radically in recent years, to his knowledge. While the university doesn’t face this situation often, the admissions office could potentially need to use different criteria, or “cutoffs,” for resident versus nonresident applicants if the nonresident application rates continue to rise significantly.
UO applicants are separated into pools by residency. According to Rawlins, Oregon residents don’t have to worry about the increased applications from out-of-state and international students. But out-of-state students like Kaufer do.
Admissions officers are forced to make the cuts by making traditional criteria, such as test scores and GPA, “hyper-competitive,” as Rawlins puts it.  
“As much as we in the college admissions profession lament this, we’re all embarrassingly aware that we create (these criteria),” he said.
Californians make up 23 percent of the student body and are the largest population of non-Oregonians at the UO. But why are so many Californian graduates leaving their home state for the UO, as well as other schools?
“None of the others caught my interest,” Kaufer said. “And I knew that a lot of them had problems with budgets and financial aid, and I knew the California system was so impacted.”
A 2012 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found a decline in high school graduates from the state attending the state’s higher education facilities. “Enrollment rates to (University of California) and (California State University) have fallen by one-fifth, from about 22 percent to below 18 percent,” according to the report. It identified changes to infrastructure due to budget cuts in education across the state as a deterrent for high school grads.
Getting accepted into a university depends on how many high school grads are vying to get into their state schools, according to Rawlins.
California graduated 397,871 high school students in 2013. Oregon had 31,440 high school graduates in 2013 and the second lowest graduation rate in the country.
“It’s such a different state – massively different numbers. So we would never look at our admit rates for Oregon residents and compare them to University of California and say, ‘we’re more selective or less selective,’” Rawlins said.
Projections from the state of California predict high school graduate numbers to hold in the area of about 350,000 to 390,000 grads per year. Although interest in UC schools appears to have dropped, UCLA still received a record 105,800 freshman applications for Fall 2014.
By comparison, UO deals with far less applications. It received the most in 2011, with 23,010, according to data from Jacobs.
However, the application growth for the UO is still the biggest growth the campus has ever seen — but why is that growth happening?
“It’s not because (students) are seeing that many more places that could be great for them,” Rawlins said. “It’s out of desperation.”
Kaufer noted that the UO’s academic program and campus vibe were some of the most attractive qualities of the school, as was the athletic community that would allow her to not only participate in sports but join the legion of Duck fans in cheering on her team.
The highest jump in applications to the UO came from out-of-state students in 2011. There were 16,200 out of state applications that year: an increase of about 4,000 from 2010.
Incidentally, this was the year after the UO football team was ranked number one in the Associated Press poll for the first time in program history.
Rawlins acknowledged the success of the football team bringing publicity to the university. “Is it a reason to choose us? No. But if it opens up the doors for them to think about us and learn more, then great, we’ll take it”
The increased nonresident presence at the UO has also brought more tuition dollars to the university. From 2006 to 2013, tuition increased 63.2 percent, or about $12,000, for nonresidents. In the same time, tuition increased 60.47 percent, or around $3,500, for residents.
The rate at which both group’s tuition has increased has actually been the same, as the graph below illustrates. This has changed a bit as tuition freezes come for OUS schools and the UO lowers tuition for resident students in the coming year.