With an $8 million budget cut looming over the University, our leaders are frantically scrambling to find solutions. An increased enrollment figured to be pushing 20,000 means the University will be forced to do more with less. Generic ideas like cutting programs, putting a freeze on new hires and increasing tuition have all been put on the table, but even with these ideas, the University is in a dubious position of always receiving the short end of the stick. The solution is for the University to go private.
There is no question that this school is the beacon of the Oregon University System, but it is at a crossroad. This campus continuously operates with a balanced budget, has found alternative funding sources to expand facilities and recently completed the most successful fund-raising drive in state history. All this is done while other OUS schools keep finding their way into trouble. So while state dollars could be flowing to the University to make it one of the premier schools on the West Coast, this money is going to make other OUS schools nothing more than average.
Over in La Grande, anybody can attend the glorified community college know as Eastern Oregon University for the same in-state rate. During the budget cuts of the 1980s, there was talk of closing Western Oregon University in Monmouth and using the facilities as a correctional institution. Yet for some reason these schools and others continue to waste resources that could be best used elsewhere in the Oregon University System, like here.

Last year, the OUS set a goal of creating a top-25 engineering program at Oregon State University, a school that has managed to go $19 million in the red. When a college can’t responsibly spend the money it already has, it doesn’t make sense to give it more when the money could be better spent at another institution.
Just ask Mike Eyster, who, as the University’s housing director, pays $1.3 million per year toward a statewide debt pool. University Housing racked up only 17 percent of the pool but pays off 36 percent of it. The difference helped schools like Oregon State University build a new residence hall but prevents the University from doing the same.
As a private school, tuition would increase quite drastically, because it is a simple economic fact that a better product costs more — and a better product is what the University should be striving for. Creating endowments could offset some tuition costs, and the University has already proven that it can raise money by itself. Increased tuition also means that enrollment would drop off because some students wouldn’t be able to attend the new and improved University of Oregon, but this is fine. As the cost of tuition goes up, so should admission standards.
The top universities in the nation are those that have students whose primary purpose is more than just receiving a piece of paper with their name on it at the end. These are also the schools with well-paid professors, modern facilities and hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. In U.S. News and World Report’s most recent rankings of national doctoral universities, two-thirds of the nation’s top 50 schools are private.
It is time we make the switch and join them.