2023-2024 Tuition Increase

The new rates will be effective for the Fall 2023 semester.

As a public university, the University of Oklahoma places a strong emphasis on balancing academic excellence with affordability and access. The increase, which will generate approximately $7 million, will significantly help support OU’s Strategic Plan, specifically areas that will enhance the student experience.

Raising tuition is never an easy decision. Factors that influenced this decision include the inflation rate skyrocketing to a 40-year high of nearly 6%, coupled with its effect on our ability to maintain competitive compensation for faculty and staff.

We’re approaching this in a manner that not only maintains accessibility for students with the greatest financial need but also enhances our investment in these individuals. Our goal is to ensure that an OU education remains available to all, and as a result, we have witnessed tangible outcomes. Specifically, compared to five years ago, the average annual cost of tuition and fees, after factoring in discounts, has decreased by 6% for residents and increased less than 1% for nonresidents. We’ve also cut costs – over the last five years, we identified and saved approximately $140 million on a recurring basis from our Norman campus operating budget.

Although the State Legislature has done much to invest in specific higher education initiatives, particularly related to research, appropriations to OU have fallen dramatically over the years. In the mid-80s, state funding made up about 42% of OU’s operating budget. Today, it only makes up roughly 15%.

This year’s increase will significantly help support the OU Strategic Plan, specifically areas that will enhance the student experience. Funds generated from the rate increase are expressly earmarked toward:

Improvements to Academics

• Key investments in research, which will enhance the classroom. experience and research enterprise, ultimately helping OU achieve AAU-caliber results.
• Aviation support to expand student enrollment to meet growing demand.
• Investing in academic advising positions to help students on their path to graduation.

Enhanced Student Growth and Experience Opportunities

• Hiring additional Career Center staff to provide best-in-class student support and job placement focus.
• Reducing fees for students in graduate assistantships.

Improvements to the Campus Experience

• Supporting a merit-based salary increase for eligible faculty and staff for FY24. Maintaining a competitive compensation for our faculty and staff lies at the core of the excellence we owe to our students.
• Targeting funding to sustain low-cost and free services, and to provide additional support for student-centric services, such as the University Counseling Center, OU Food Pantry, and SafeRide.
• Addressing inflationary fixed cost increases around insurance and other operational expenses, including deferred maintenance.

As part of the Strategic Plan, we will continue to expand our student services, launch new academic programs, fund innovative research, invest in hiring new faculty, and more. Most of these investments are long overdue, but are ones that we believe will sustain OU’s excellence for generations.

OU realizes that this increase has a real impact on students and families. The university’s plan to substantially increase the availability of need-based aid so that students who have the ability to succeed and excel also have the opportunity is OU’s No. 1 fundraising priority.

• In the last five years, need-based aid has grown more than 48% (institutional aid, external awards, and tuition waivers combined).
• Need-based aid is a major component of our $2 billion fundraising campaign we launched last fall, which designates $500 million toward scholarships and student support.
  
• OU will also continue the Crimson Commitment program, which began in Fall 2019 and provides qualified students with up to $8,400 in scholarships to cover annual fees and 100% of tuition. In Fall 2022, OU expanded our Crimson Commitment program to incoming Oklahoma’s Promise transfer students who are members of Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society or participants of the Ticket to Rose program at Rose State College.
• In the last five years, the tuition discount rates provided to resident freshmen has risen 30 percentage points, from 36% in FY18 to 66% in FY23.
  
• This increase in tuition discounting for residents has enabled the university to improve recruitment and retention, helping OU’s 6-year graduation rate reach 75.7% – an all-time high for OU.

In addition, for the 2022-2023 academic year, the university developed a multi-phase Tuition and Fee Simplification initiative that resulted in the consolidated of nearly 700 fees. Benefits of this process include:

• Easier to read Bursar bill.
• Updated and easier to understand fee descriptions and purposes.
• Updated explanations to improve line of sight into how fee dollars are spent.

We always want to guarantee that our operations are efficient and that we are not wasteful in our spending. That’s why over the last five years, OU identified and saved approximately $140 million on a recurring basis from our Norman campus operating budget. Over the last five years, OU has grown full-time faculty by 12% and reduced the student-to-faculty ratio from 18.4 to 16.4. At the same time, OU reduced its full-time staff 8% from 3,978 in fall 2017 to 3,645 in fall 2022, as we seek to support students and faculty in an efficient and effective manner and prioritize spend in areas such as faculty and need-based aid.

Over the past six years, including our proposed FY24 tuition plan, OU has only increased resident tuition once, leading to an average 0.9% increase in tuition and mandatory fees per year for residents. Using State Regents peer data, the increase at peer institutions was 4.7% per year, nearly 5 times higher than OU.

Over the last five years, even with holding resident rates flat, the tuition and mandatory fee increase for resident undergraduates at OU has averaged 0.5%/year. Compared to Big 12 Public peers, OU will be 73% of peer for resident and 75% of peer for nonresident undergraduate rates after the change.

OU students consistently graduate with less debt than students at most other Big 12 schools. 55% of all undergraduates from OU graduate debt-free,* compared to 42% at four-year public universities nationwide.

*This percentage is for undergraduates who started at OU as first-time students and graduated between 7/1/21 and 6/30/22, which is the standard measure for this data point.

For several years, OU has been making progress toward increasing support for graduate education. In 2018, OU launched a multi-year initiative to lower fees for graduate assistants (GAs), saving these students nearly $3,900 per year compared to six years ago.

We understand this decision has real impacts; that’s why a core team of OU administrators engaged student leaders in extensive conversation, holding Fall and Spring meetings to better understand the effects of a tuition and fee increase on students.

Our professionals in the Student Financial Center stand ready to help as you seek financial aid and create a plan to fund the upcoming year.