Projections are in: UO counts another record fall enrollment.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

The University of Oregon expects its fall enrollment to inch above last year's record, notching another milestone with about 20,500 students.

That will make the fourth time in the past five years that the university has set an enrollment record. The only exception was fall 2003, when the school missed a record by 12 students.

The story is much the same at Oregon State University, where enrollment is expected to hit approximately 19,300 students. That would be up from 19,162 last fall and would be the ninth year in a row that OSU has set an enrollment record.

The numbers for both schools are only estimates; some students who have indicated they will enroll in the fall still might change their minds and others who planned to go elsewhere still could land at either school. But with an increase in state support both for universities and financial aid, UO admissions director Martha Pitts said 2005-06 is shaping up as a good year.

"We're really pleased with what we're seeing for enrollment for fall term," she said. "We're real pleased with the quality of the students coming into the University of Oregon, and with the gubernatorial and legislative investment in higher education, from an enrollment standpoint we're really pretty optimistic."

The 2005 Legislature boosted funding for higher education 5 percent above the last biennium, to $706.5 million, although that's still 8 percent less than what universities received in 2001-03. But legislators also held tuition increases to 3 percent a year and increased funding for need-based tuition aid by 50 percent, enough money to provide grants to all eligible students for the first time.

Those actions came too late in the year to have much effect on enrollment this year because most students applied for admission last fall and winter. But Pitts said it still sends an important message, especially to high school seniors who will start sending out their college applications next month.

"This reinvestment in higher education we hope will really have an impact on access to higher education for students who may have counted themselves out of the process because they couldn't afford it or believed they couldn't afford it," she said. "That's a really exciting prospect not just for this year but for the near future."

If the UO projection holds up, enrollment will increase less than 1 percent over the 20,339 students who signed up for classes last fall. That's in line with the university's policy over the past five years of keeping a damper on enrollment growth.

Universities still receive less funding than they did before the state plunged into recession in the late 1990s, and the UO continues to enroll more students than the state funds. The number of unfunded students this year remains uncertain but is likely to be close to the 1,500 to 2,000 figure of recent years.

"Our goal has been and continues to be to maintain our enrollment in that corridor between 20,000 and 21,000 students," Pitts said.

Bob Bontrager, OSU's assistant provost for enrollment management, said that after several years of dramatic annual increases starting in 1998, Oregon State has settled into a pattern of more modest and predictable growth. That's good, he said, because the campus probably can't handle another run of big enrollment spurts.

"We would have to pay close attention to any significant growth over where we are right now," he said.

The UO's freshman class is expected to be about the same size as last year's 3,093, a level that typically keeps the residence halls comfortably full. The incoming class also is expected to have a similar grade-point average and test scores as last year, when they averaged 3.49 and 1,114 on the SAT, respectively.

Although the UO requires a 3.25 GPA for automatic admission, students with grades at or above 3.0 rarely have trouble getting in, Pitts said.