Willamette and Pacific Universities say merger will save money, serve students

Public and private universities alike are facing increasing financial strain with rising costs, limited funding and tuition already unaffordable for many. Now two of Oregon’s private universities have decided to merge, in large part to save money. Willamette University and Pacific University are the oldest colleges in Oregon and the entire Western U.S., predating Oregon statehood. Leaders of both universities say their institutions’ mission and values are aligned. They also say the merger won’t just save money but will “expand academic offerings, broaden access, and deepen the opportunities for students across the region.”

The structure Willamette and Pacific are pursuing is what’s known as a collegiate model, where multiple universities exist as part of a larger institution. The two universities will retain their names and campuses as part of what will likely be named the University of the Northwest. Pacific University President Jenny Coyle and Willamette University President Steve Thorsett join us to discuss the merger and its impact on the institutions and the students they serve.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez. It is official. Willamette University in Salem and Pacific University in Forest Grove have formally agreed to join forces and merge into one institution. Mergers between universities and colleges are becoming more common as schools across the country navigate difficult financial waters. But leaders of both schools have attributed their decision not to current financial pressures, but the goal of investing in their future and expanding opportunities for their students.

Joining me now are the leaders of Oregon’s two oldest private universities. Jenny Coyle is the president of Pacific University and Steve Thorsett is the president of Willamette University. Thank you both so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

Steve Thorsett: Thank you, Jenn. It’s great to be with you.

Jenny Coyle: Great to be here.

Chávez: Oh, thank you. It’s great to be with y’all as well. So I wanna start by asking each of you the same question. What are some of the things you’re most proud of when you think about the university you lead? Jenny Coyle, how about you first?

Coyle: All right. Well, we actually are the two oldest universities in the west.

Chávez: Oh, OK.

Coyle: Yes, so we’re quite proud of that. And we’re quite proud of our mission and how we’re both – Steve, sorry, I’m gonna answer for both of us and you can add on – so mission-focused. We are about providing for communities in a way that helps strengthen the community through education and access. I’m proud of Pacific University. We are the number one private preparer of health care professionals in Oregon. And we have a 176-year history of really providing access to education.

Chávez: Steve, do you have anything to add there? I know Jenny said she was gonna answer a bit on your behalf too.

Thorsett: No, and I think that she’s right on target there. I think we’re both very proud of how we have contributed for almost two centuries now to building this region. So Willamette was the first institution of higher education in the Western United States, and it was really built to educate leaders across all of civic society. We’re really proud of how our alumni have gone out into the world and contributed to the communities that they’re in, in the Northwest and all over the world, in so many different ways.

And Willamette today is a very different institution than it was in 1842. We have been a pioneer in lots of different fields: the founding of the first medical school, the first pharmacy school, the first school of education in the Northwest. The Pacific Northwest College of Art, which is now part of Willamette, was the first professional school of art and design in the Northwest. [We’re] recently growing into fields like data science and computer science. We’ve been ranked the top data science graduate program in the Pacific Northwest. So being a school that has adapted to serve this region for so long.

Chávez: Well, like I said in the beginning, schools in Oregon and really across the country have been navigating some financial challenges. But you have both said that that is not the reason behind your choice to merge. So, what made taking this path appealing to you both?

Coyle: I’ll lead off on that one. You’re right, higher ed is challenged right now, and there’s a lot in the news about retrenching, shrinking and cutting. And what Steve and I have designed and what we’re really excited about is a new way where the two oldest institutions are coming together to grow, and to change, and to be able to do more. And by joining forces, Pacific and Willamette are really able to expand opportunities for our students and our alumni. We know that in this environment, on our own, it would virtually be impossible for us to expand our academic offerings in a way that this merger is gonna allow us to do within a few short years.

Chávez: So, for folks trying to wrap their heads around what a merger of two schools might mean, maybe Steve, if you could give insight on this one: Does this merger mean your two schools will become one big super-school, or that they’ll stay two schools but just be connected in a new way? What will this actually look like for both schools?

Thorsett: I think one of the things that’s been most exciting for us is really defining a new type of institution that is better matched to the needs of our students now. We call it sometimes the New American Collegiate University model, to give it a fancy name. But really, it is a way to bring independent institutions together without flattening them into a single institution, giving them an umbrella infrastructure that can support all of them. So in this case, we have three separate undergraduate colleges in Forest Grove, in Salem, and then the PNCA campus in downtown Portland. All of those will continue very much in the same form that they are in now.

Students will still apply to, be admitted to, enroll in an individual college. But those colleges are brought together along with our broad range of graduate programs into a big university structure, a so-called collegiate university that can provide all of the resources, infrastructure and coordination between the individual campuses that allow us to do interesting, new things.

Chávez: I know this collegiate university model that we’re talking about is kind of new to our region but is more common elsewhere. Are there other systems that you have looked to for inspiration or for guidance navigating this new thing for y’all?

Coyle: Yes, we are looking to European model. Think of Oxford or Cambridge. Those are excellent examples of a collegiate university model where you have this unbelievably prestigious, overarching institution that is very place-based and serving a region. But underneath, you have these small-scale, human-centered colleges that are very strong and continue to be a place of pride, and a place of tradition, mascots, and all of the things that we loved about college, underneath a stronger university model.

The other thing about a collegiate university is that it allows us to think about additional complementary institutions that might want to come in under the fold with us. By the two institutions coming together, Pacific and Willamette, we will have one of the broadest portfolios of graduate and professional programs. But we don’t cover absolutely everything, and our goal is to be able to provide education for as broad as we possibly can. This collegiate model allows us to think to the future, and be nimble, and be able to perhaps welcome in other institutions, and be able to offer even more for our students and our alumni.

Chávez: I think you’ve said in the past that these two schools complement each other in a way that made this merger make a lot of sense to you. And I think one of the ways is just the offerings that each of you excel in, in terms of what you offer to students, resources, opportunities. Maybe Steve, if I could get your take, how does this expand the academic opportunities for students at both of your institutions?

Thorsett: I think there are a couple of layers to answering that question. The first is the simplest, which is just that it gives students an easier set of pathways that connect, for example, undergraduate liberal arts education to graduate professional education. Each of our individual schools currently has accelerated paths where, at Willamette, for a student to do both a political science undergraduate degree and a law degree, and save a year, for example, or similar programs into education or the health professions at Pacific. The first thing that will be possible here is for students to cross those lines, for Willamette students to go into education graduate programs, social work graduate programs or psychology graduate programs at Pacific, or for Pacific students to enter data science programs or art and design programs at Willamette.

The next layer, as we bring the institutions together, is to really infuse those intellectual connections within the faculty. One of the great comparative advantages of smaller institutions like this is building interdisciplinarity. We’re preparing students for this really complex world where they need to be able to not just bring different domains of knowledge together, but also learn to adapt as the world itself changes quickly. And being able to bring, for example, artificial intelligence together with the faculty members who are doing management, with the faculty members who are designing the experiences of patients in clinics is a way of bringing students into that complexity that they will need to face out in the world.

Chávez: What we’re kind of talking about is if students want to, for example, start a track of study at one school and transfer to another, or be able to access resources from potentially both schools at the same time, does that become easier within this model?

Coyle: It does, because we’re one. We’ll be, in a sense, with this New American Collegiate model, a system analogous to like the University of California. And…

Chávez: I went to a UC, so I know all about them.

Coyle: Yes, it definitely would be easier for students, because first of all, communication will be strong internally. Students will know us and they will understand where the registrar office [is] and they’ve been interacting with all of our different departments. And then we’ll outline pathways to make it easy for students to understand. Basically, we’re going to break down barriers for students to be able to go from college to career, whether it’s through joining forces to provide more internship experiences. We’ll be working towards job placement for students and working with local industry. And then if students are interested in graduate programs, as Steve outlined, we will have to find pathways to make it easier for them to get to their career goals.

Chávez: Excellent. Steve, how do you think this merger could help each school financially?

Thorsett: Well, I think that there are lots of ways that savings come, just from scale. So each school doesn’t have to do its own financial audit. We don’t each need to run our own employee data system. We don’t each need to run our own alumni databases. So simply reducing the duplication in the infrastructure will help. But then you start to think about things like combined and strategic library purchasing. With the same library budget, it’s possible to buy twice as many different books if you don’t have to duplicate everything twice.

So there are trade-offs between being able to expand the quality of our programs or the breadth of our programs and finding real cost savings that can be redirected into more financial aid for our students, or stronger salaries and benefits for our faculty and staff, which is also an important goal for us.

Chávez: And what will this change, just in a few brief moments we have left, look like for faculty?

Thorsett: I’ll start that one. I think the most exciting thing for faculty is going to be all of the new colleagues that they have, both in their own fields where we will have twice as many English faculty members, for example, who can bring a sense of intellectual community, but also across disciplines as I mentioned before. I think the intellectual excitement that goes with scale is going to be just a tremendous advantage for us.

Chávez: Well, we’re gonna have to leave it there today. But Jenny Coyle and Steve Thorsett, I just wanna thank you both so much for taking the time to join us today, and we will definitely continue keeping our eye on this here at OPB.

Thorsett: Thanks so much.

Coyle: Thanks for having us.

Chávez: Thank you. Jenny Coyle is the president of Pacific University in Forest Grove, and Steve Thorsett is the president of Willamette University in Salem.

Editor’s Note: Our transcripts are initially generated using AI and then edited by an OPB transcription volunteer. In the transcript for this segment, we have corrected a transcription editing error in Pacific University President Jenny Coyle’s first answer about Willamette and Pacific Universities being the oldest institutions “in the West.” The transcription of her response initially read “U.S.” instead of “West.” OPB regrets the error.

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