Dive Brief:
- The University of Oregon is freezing hiring and pay as well as capping nonessential travel as it tries to cut $65 million in costs and “avoid an ongoing annual budget deficit in the coming years,” President Karl Scholz said last week.
- The austerity measures, which went into effect last week, come as university officials now project “significantly lower” enrollment of first-year out-of-state students in the next academic year.
- As it slashes its budget, the university also aims to invest in its research strengths and student experience to attract the best talent and boost enrollment, Scholz said in a May 14 message to the UO community.
Dive Insight:
Scholz tied the spending measures to UO’s plans to invest in research and student experience, saying the university must conserve resources so it can plan for the long term.
“We need to take this opportunity to refocus the UO on how to deliver on our mission differently and put us on a path to be a stronger, more competitive, and more resilient university,” he said.
But Scholz also took pains to explain the impact of out-of-state enrollment on the university’s overall budget. Tuition accounts for roughly 80% of UO’s education and general fund, he said. The general fund supports a majority of the university’s activities.
And of that tuition revenue, the biggest contributor is out-of-staters, according to the president. As a March UO board meeting document put it, “Currently, nonresident tuition revenue significantly subsidizes the funds received, both from the state and students, for the education of resident students.”
In fall 2025, nonresidents made up 47.1% of UO’s 24,448 students, with that share increasing significantly since the early 2000s.
All of that means the projected dip in nonresident enrollment next year — which Scholz did not quantify — stands to have an outsized effect on the university’s finances. The enrollment decline itself he attributed to demographic shifts, political disruption of international enrollment, increased competition, declining trust in higher education and economic uncertainty.
UO leaders want to do more than just patch the budget gaps. “I believe we are now at a crossroads. We could take smaller steps matching short-run expenses with revenues,” Scholz said. “But with smaller actions, we would have little confidence that we would not have to make another round of cuts next year.”
The university has already been through multiple rounds of belt-tightening, including $30 million in budget cuts and well over 100 layoffs last year. Those were bruising decisions to the university community, with academic groups denouncing them as “hasty” and made without adequate employee involvement.
UO is not alone in its struggles among Oregon public colleges. Under financial stress, Portland State University and Southern Oregon University are both mulling significant restructuring efforts that would entail layoffs and downsizing.
Meanwhile, a UO web page devoted to fiscal stewardship stresses that Oregon appropriates less money per student than other states.
In the latest State Higher Education Finance report, Oregon’s fiscal 2025 spending per full-time equivalent student — at $8,580 — ranked 14th from the bottom, and stood well below the national average of $12,082. When adjusted for cost of living, the ranking is even worse, according to the UO page.
