Vicky Smith
Assistant Managing Editor
@pinkwritinglady
“U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges 2016” has reported that Cameron University students graduate with minor debt.
According to a press release, “Cameron is ranked 21st in the category of Least Debt, Class of 2014, among the 89 universities ranked in the West region of those designated as Regional Universities and is 46th among all 618 Regional Universities surveyed. Significantly, only 44 percent of Cameron’s 2014 graduates who started and completed a bachelor’s degree at Cameron incurred debt.”
Cameron President John McArthur said he is proud of Cameron’s ranking and grateful for those who have shared their knowledge and given their time and money as investments in students.
“Our faculty and our staff are so committed. I see how hard they work,” McArthur said. “Their passion is working for our students.
“I think what [also] really makes the difference is the community of Lawton/Fort Sill and surrounding areas. It’s the generosity of our alumni and our donors who provide so many of our scholarships. It’s well over a million dollars a year in scholarship money.”
McArthur said the university is committed to an affordable education because affordability may not only be the determining factor of whether someone chooses to attend college, but it also may influence the health and strength of a community.
“We think affordability is very important because we want the citizens who grow up in Southwest Oklahoma to have the opportunity to stay in Southwest Oklahoma and raise their families,” he said. “So if we can provide them affordable higher education, we think they are more likely to stay and grow and develop here.
“Communities that have high percentages of college graduates have lower unemployment rates, lower incarceration rates, lower rates of divorce [and] more engagement in community service and civic service.”
According to McArthur, affordable tuition is also an important factor in the career choice of Cameron graduates.
“I want a Cameron graduate to be able to pick their career based on their passions and interests and not based on paycheck,” he said, “and not feel like they have to go chase a job that they’re not as interested in because they need to repay a student loan.”
McArthur said Cameron’s tuition rate remains affordable because he and Cameron faculty are frugal in their operations.
“By frugal,” he said, “I mean that any time a proposal comes forward that would increase a cost to our students, we would give that proposal a lot of scrutiny … particularly, we put a strong emphasis on what we see in the classroom. We want your dollars to primarily go what’s in the class.”
He said another way Cameron has maintained an affordable tuition rate is through the process of making the campus environment more ecologically efficient.
“Several years ago,” McArthur said, “we entered into a performance contract to review the heating and cooling needs of all our structures on campus, so we’ve been slowly making changes around campus.
“The amount of money that’s saving us is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, just by replacing our windows with double-pane glass, changing low-flow water fixtures where appropriate [and] switching to LED lights and low-use fluorescence.”
McArthur said if state support for higher education continues to decrease, the university already has a plan in place regarding tuition.
“We have two fundamental sources of revenue,” he said. “One’s our allocation from the state, which is from the taxpayers of Oklahoma, and then the other is tuition and fee revenue from our students. We have some other smaller pools of money, but those are the two big ones.
“We are committed to keeping the cost of Cameron education affordable, but as we’re looking at future plans for tuition and scholarships, our priority is going to be students who grew up in Southwest Oklahoma.”
McArthur said the reason those students will be the priority is because 40 percent of the university’s budget comes from the state tax payers.
“If the state tax payers of Oklahoma are investing in Cameron,” he said, “Cameron should invest in Oklahomans. It doesn’t mean we’re going to not provide support for others, but our primary emphasis is going to be on people who grew up in our service area. We serve about 11 counties in Southwest Oklahoma. Most of our students come from Comanche and Stephens county.”
For students who may be struggling with debt, the first piece of advice McArthur offers is to apply for scholarships.
“We’ve recently switched to a common application,” he said, “so instead of having to apply for each scholarship, you can apply once, and then the financial aid office will match, in a lot of cases, all the scholarships you are eligible to receive.
“If you go to Cameron’s webpage and go to financial aid, it’s under the scholarship application. Actually, the fall 2016 scholarship application is already up, so you can get started now for next year.”
McArthur said the university strives to make scholarships available for students.
“Any time we raise tuition,” he said, “we set aside at least that additional percentage in internal scholarships through university funds.
“We spend a lot of time working with our graduates and our other donors to provide additional scholarship support for our students. Last year, the alumni and development office raised about two million dollars, and half of that was specifically earmarked for student scholarships.”
The second piece of advice McArthur offers students is to work hard.
“Many of our scholarships have some kind of GPA requirement,” he said, “so probably the biggest favor you can do for yourself: study a little bit more instead of going out one night.”
For the third piece of advice, McArthur said students should only take out the loans necessary to complete their education.
“Many of our students qualify for much bigger loans than they may need to pay for the cost of a Cameron degree,” he said. “Think about what your real finance needs are, and just because someone is willing to loan you $20,000 a year doesn’t mean you should take $20,000 a year.”
McArthur said the university is committed to providing students with an education that is both inexpensive in financial cost and priceless in educational value.
“We want to continue to provide great opportunities to our students,” he said, “like being able to work in the newsroom, the Collegian news room, in the Academic Commons, having the laboratory facilities in the sciences, having a simulated trading floor in the school of business.
“We want our students not just to have an inexpensive education; we want them to have a quality education.”