Lillis Hall on the University of Oregon campus.
OPB
Some Oregon universities are larger than they’ve ever been, but two of the state's largest universities got a bit smaller.
Portland State University shrank by more than 800 students. If not for its growing Latino student body, PSU would’ve gotten even smaller.
Two years ago, the state’s largest universities — PSU and Oregon State University — were almost exactly the same size. Portland State had 28,931 students; OSU had 28,886.
With PSU getting smaller and OSU getting bigger, Portland State is now clearly second-largest in the state. The downtown Portland university has about 27,200 students. Oregon State cleared 30,000 for the first time this fall.
PSU officials expect the university to shrink even further next year – in part because students are headed to community colleges, under the nearly-free “Oregon Promise” program.
Oregon State University's current enrollment caps a 33 percent increase since 2009. The growth spurt in the last year of nearly 1,500 students was helped by an expansion of the OSU-Cascades campus in Bend, which now serves 1,122 students according to campus officials.
"The enrollment increase spread across majors, with the largest majors now reported as business administration, human development and family sciences, biology, natural resources, energy systems engineering and kinesiology," according to a statement from OSU-Cascades.
Those expansions have launched OSU well past University of Oregon. It was seven years ago that those two universities were close to the same size.
University of Oregon has also shrunk. Officials at both U of O and PSU say demographics – fewer graduating high schoolers – is part of the reason.
In 2009, official enrollment numbers put OSU at 21,969 students. U of O was a hair larger than its Corvallis-based counterpart at 22,386. Since then, Oregon State has continued to grow, but U of O's enrollment has basically stayed flat.
University of Oregon’s enrollment changed very little between 2012 and 2015. This fall, enrollment fell by almost 500 students.
Vice president of enrollment, Roger Thompson, said U of O has been aiming to stay at around 24,000 students. This fall, they’re under that.
“Our goal has not been to grow the overall student population. Instead, we wanted to improve quality, which we’ve done," Thompson said. "The average high school GPA has gone from a 3.4 to 3.6.”
Other universities have maintained high academic demands while growing such as OSU-Cascades, where officials report an average incoming GPA of 3.56.
Oregon Institute of Technology's Wilsonville campus
Oregon Institute of Technology
Thompson said the university is looking to increase the diversity of its student body and attract more international students — a theme shared by officials at OSU and OIT, where international and historically underrepresented student groups have also been a priority. PSU has made a priority of recruiting Latino students - a demographic that increased at the university to more than 11 percent of the student body.
Thompson said the decline at U of O this fall was anticipated in part with the departure of a large graduating class.
U of O had planned for about 150 more students than showed up, Thompson said. Though he pointed out that 150 is not a big number at a university with nearly 24,000 students.
Oregon Institute of Technology now has also grown. Its two campuses in Klamath Falls and Wilsonville - and its online presence - now enroll more than 5,000 students. Administrators calculate a 65 percent increase over the last 10 years, as OIT has opened the Wilsonville program and offered more courses online. But a big chunk of OIT's growth involved students who haven't finished high school. Oregon Tech boosted its "college credit programs offered to high school students" by 46 percent in the last year.
Updates
This article was updated Nov. 17 at 5:45 p.m. PST with enrollments numbers from PSU.
This article was originally published Nov. 15, 2016.