FILE - A sign on the Southern Oregon University campus in Ashland, Ore., in and undated file photo.
Jane Vaughan / JPR
An effort that could lead to major changes to Oregon’s universities is being brought to Salem by a legislator whose district includes an institution facing powerful financial headwinds in today’s challenging climate for higher education.
Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, is cosponsoring a bill intended to protect the future viability of Oregon’s higher education system.
House Bill 4124 would direct the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission to evaluate the distinct objectives of each institution as well as opportunities for collaboration, restructuring or integration. It could also evaluate how academic programs support workforce needs, whether programs are unnecessarily duplicated and how institutions are addressing affordability.
“We do not have time to sit around and twiddle our thumbs. We have to turn this system quickly,” Marsh said. “I’ll be doing everything I can to make sure that this is not a pro forma study, but it’s actually big-picture, outside-the-box thinking about what higher ed can look like.”
Oregon’s universities have recently faced rising personnel costs for benefit programs, such as retirement and health insurance, declining enrollment and state support that’s ranked among the least generous in the country.
Southern Oregon University, based in Ashland, is perhaps the state’s public higher education institution that could experience the most impact from the proposed bill. The university has suffered from back-to-back years of budget deficits.
At an SOU trustees meeting earlier this week, university leaders forecast that it would not be able to cover its payroll a year from now.This bill follows a recommendation in a recent report from the HECC, which the leadership at Southern Oregon University has pushed back on. SOU leaders say the problem is not inefficiency, but chronic underfunding.
The HECC report also recommends periodic program review and a separate salary pool for essential compensation increases, among other things.
“We have proposed new strategies to help the public system contain costs in a challenging fiscal environment so that they can continue to deliver affordable, quality education to Oregonians, and avoid passing financial burden on to students and families,” HECC Executive Director Ben Cannon said in a statement.
HECC neither supports nor opposes the bill.
“If the Legislature asks us to develop integration proposals, we would work closely with institutions to consider various degrees of integration, which could range from programmatic partnerships to deeper shared services to formal affiliations or mergers,” Cannon said.
Higher education leaders and advocacy groups throughout the state have expressed serious concerns over the bill. Among their biggest worries is the bill’s potential to infringe on institutional independence. They are urging lawmakers to approach it cautiously.
“I won’t pretend that every one of our public universities hasn’t come through my office this week already to share their thoughts and feelings,” Rep. April Dobson, D-Happy Valley, said at a public hearing on the bill Wednesday morning.
Dobson and other lawmakers on the House Committee on Education questioned how the proposed legislation would protect academic freedom at universities.
The bill’s sponsors and Cannon said the core principles of academic freedom — what courses cover and how they are taught — would remain untouched.
Marsh said Oregon needs to reevaluate its vision for higher education.
Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, at the Oregon Capitol in Salem, Ore. on Monday, Feb 2, 2026.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
“It is a harsh thing to say, but it is also true that our system has essentially lost the confidence of the public, and frankly, of a lot of legislators who are trying to figure out why the costs of higher ed seem so unconstrained,” she said.
Regarding the bill, SOU President Rick Bailey said he is open to discussing solutions but wants the Legislature to remain focused on getting colleges the resources they need.
“What I don’t want us to do as a state is take our eye off the ball and distract ourselves from what the real core issue is here in this state, and that is a chronic, decades-long underfunding of colleges and universities,” he said.
Oregon is 46th in the nation in per-student state funding for public universities, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
The House Committee on Education is set to vote on the bill on Monday, Feb. 9.
If the bill passes this session, HECC would have to compile its report and recommendations on a quick timeline, which is another concern of higher ed leaders.
The report has a Dec. 1 deadline, with the goal of lawmakers acting on recommendations in 2027.
JPR is licensed to Southern Oregon University, but the newsroom operates independently. Guided by our journalistic standards and ethics, we cover the university like any other organization in the region. No university official reviewed or edited this story before it was published.
Jane Vaughan is a reporter with JPR. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
This collaborate story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.
