Two of Oregon’s oldest nonprofit universities are exploring a merger, which would create the state’s largest independent private university with more than 6,000 students enrolled across four separate campuses.
The presidents of Willamette University, which has its flagship campus in Salem, and Pacific University, which is based in Forest Grove, said that if approved by state and federal regulators, a process they expect could take at least two years, the two schools would be known as the University of the Northwest. The two have signed a letter of intent, which starts the clock on a cost-benefit analysis for both campuses.
Similar mergers have been announced across the country with increasing frequency over the last decade, particularly among smaller liberal arts colleges and universities. Such schools are facing the one-two punch of public skepticism over the rising price of tuition and a smaller pool of applicants given a declining birth rate that stretches back to the Great Recession of 2008.
“We are at a defining moment where we need to be thinking about doing things differently,” said Jenny Coyle, the president of Pacific University since 2022. “So can we have this larger university system that can navigate change and be more fluid, with greater resources, with more people power and more brain trust?”
Coyle and Stephen Thorsett, the president of Willamette University since 2011, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the two have been talking about the possibility of combining their campuses since last spring.
Both schools remain on solid financial footing, with balanced budgets, which is often not the case in such situations, Thorsett noted.
“The thing that is just different about this compared to almost any other merger going on at the moment nationally is that it is not a small failing institution or an institution that’s concerned about its sustainability merging into a bigger institution,” he said. “This is a merger of two equals. We believe that Oregon deserves a great private university, a university that the rest of the country can look at as a model for what could be built elsewhere.”
The two schools both offer traditional arts and sciences degrees to undergraduates, but do not have broad overlap in their array of graduate and pre-professional offerings.
Willamette, the oldest university in the western United States, is known for its law school, graduate school of management and, since 2020, for its stewardship of the Pacific Northwest College of Art in downtown Portland, which merged with Willamette in 2020.
Pacific, which has campuses in Forest Grove, Hillsboro and Portland, offers graduate degree programs in education, social work, optometry, occupational and physical therapy and clinical psychology, and says it graduates more health care providers than any other private university in Oregon.
Were the two campuses to join forces, Coyle and Thorsett said, they would maintain their own identities, including separate athletics programs as the schools have long been NCAA Division III rivals. Each school would have its own admissions and financial aid departments and its own set of course requirements, but would be governed by a single board of trustees overseeing both universities.
Should the merger come to pass, students enrolled at Pacific would more readily be able to take advantage of course offerings and graduate programs at Willamette and vice-versa, the two said, in an effort to broaden the landscape of potential career paths for students at the schools. Both said they would look to current faculty members to help design how that will impact cross-campus students.
“If we want to be able to work with the Nikes and Intels and Boeings and other major employers, being a larger institution that can bring a unified approach to building out externships and internships into jobs will be a great advantage for our students,” Thorsett said.
Only about 53% of Oregon’s class of 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, enrolled in a college, university or post-secondary training program within a year of graduating from high school, state data shows. New data from the class of 2023 should be available this month. That’s well below national averages, even though a growing number of United States students say they have reservations about both the cost and utility of a college degree.
Pacific’s Coyle said the proposed merger would better position both schools to counter that narrative. Research shows that students who graduate with liberal arts degrees earn more over their lifetimes than students who lack a college degree, she said, and college is also a place where students learn valuable life skills that they can draw on in adulthood.
The cost of tuition and residential fees at Pacific is $77,542; at Willamette, it is $71,254, though many students at both schools receive some level of financial aid to reduce those costs.
“Each of us has been looking at [ways] to make it possible for students to move faster and spend less money on their degrees, and to focus on that college to career pathway,” Thorsett said. “This transaction would give us a chance to center that in the conversation in an even higher profile way.”
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