Moving in the Wrong Direction…

The University of Oregon has long been a participant in the merit-aid arms race, but never really stood out. Now it’s trying to up its game.

After five years of enrollment declines, Oregon’s public flagship university laid out an ambitious plan last year to gradually add 3,000 more students to the school, all from other states.¹ The university is increasing its out-of-state recruiting staff, with the aim of expanding its presence in as many as 20 states on the East Coast the Midwest, the South, and the West.² University officials hope the plan will help the institution boost both its revenue and prestige.³

Leading this effort is Roger J. Thompson, who previously was the enrollment manager at the University of Alabama and Indiana University, two schools that have been heavily involved in the arms race.⁴ Since Thompson’s arrival in 2010 as vice president for student services and enrollment management, the population of out-of-state students has grown at the school while the number of in-state students has fallen.⁵

Meanwhile, in 2015–16, the lowest-income, in-state freshmen paid an average net price of nearly $12,000, or $1,100 more than they did—in inflation-adjusted dollars—in 2010–11. And while the university provided nearly half of its $34 million institutional aid budget to non-needy students that year, only 7 percent of financially needy freshmen had their full need met. On average, the university filled just 62 percent of the financial need of those students. Despite these large funding gaps, 17 percent of freshmen without financial need received scholarships, averaging $6,133 each.⁶

University officials insist that their plan will not come at the expense of in-state students since they are expanding total enrollment.⁷ They also point out that Pell recipients at the school who graduated high school with a GPA of at least 3.4 have their full tuition and fees covered by federal, state, and institutional aid.⁸

Thompson, in an interview with The Register-Guard in Eugene, acknowledged that the ever-increasing competition among public universities to use their aid dollars to steal students away from their home-state schools “is, in my opinion, the big public policy issue in education today.

“If you were to step back and look at that from a macro-public policy standpoint, I don’t think that it’s the solution you would choose,” he said. “But the genie is out of the bottle on that deal.”