Where were you in 2009?

Many of Oregon State University’s current seniors celebrated their 6th birthday. OSU’s younger students would have been in preschool.

In that year’s State of the University Address, then-President Ed Ray set a series of goals for OSU to reach by 2025, goals that today’s student body represents the outcome of.

As the new year begins, OSU’s student body meets or exceeds 2009 predictions for its size, number of graduates and diversity in 2025, while faculty numbers have lagged behind goals.

As reported in a 2009 Barometer article, Ray wanted OSU’s enrollment to exceed 30,000 by 2025. At the time, about 21,000 students attended OSU.

According to the university’s enrollment summary for fall term 2024, total enrollment across all OSU campuses stood at 38,125.  

Of these students, 37,163 were considered “Main Campus” students, including approximately 25,000 students at OSU’s Corvallis campus and roughly 12,000 Ecampus students, as well as smaller numbers of students in Portland and La Grande. 

Meanwhile, according to the enrollment summary, 1,296 students were enrolled at the OSU Cascades campus in fall term. The summary notes that Cascades students who took at least one Ecampus class counted as both OSU Cascades and Main Campus students.

In the address, Ray said he wanted to increase the number of tenured faculty from 738 in 2009 to at least 1,300 in 2025.

In this regard, today’s numbers fall short. 

Currently, OSU has 842 tenured faculty and 228 tenure-track faculty, according to Ashley Holmes, associate vice provost for teaching and learning, in a statement provided by OSU Media Relations Manager Sean Nealon.

Another goal set by Ray in 2009 was for the university to graduate 6,000 students each year, while OSU’s most recent graduating class at the time numbered 4,232 students. According to a Barometer article from last year’s commencement, more than 7,600 students participated. 

In his 2009 address, Ray anticipated that 25% of OSU students would be out-of-state students, and 20% to 25% of OSU students would be people of color.

In both of these categories, the current student body exceeds predictions. 

According to the enrollment summary, students of color make up 30.1% of OSU Main Campus students. OSU anticipates this increase will continue, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management Jon Boeckenstedt said in a statement provided by Nealon.

“The state is less diverse than the rest of the nation, and so in many ways, our population will look more like the state than the rest of the country,” Boeckenstedt said. “But as the population of high school graduates changes, and as we continue to attract more students from beyond Oregon’s border, we anticipate that people of color will make up a greater share of the student population.”

Out-of-state students, meanwhile, make up nearly half of OSU students. 

Based on figures from Boeckenstedt, 20.6% of Cascades students, 35.4% of Corvallis students and 77.2% of Ecampus students are from out of state, making up a total of 47.4% of the student body. 

“The population of Oregon high school graduates is expected to peak this year or next, and if we are to stay at or near capacity, it is likely we will continue to seek enrollment from outside the state at Corvallis and Cascades,” Boeckenstedt said.