A report estimates students will pay $9,444 on room and board

When Oregon State University President Ed Ray told an audience of 60 at LaSells Stewart Center during a presentation on the university’s $2.06 billion economic impact Jan. 19 that students annually spend about $11,000 on non-academic expenses, he didn’t divulge the details of this area of the report.

“We don’t want to get into what they spent their money on,” Ray joked; member of the audience giggled in response.

However, a closer look at the numbers found by ECONorthwest, a Eugene-based economic consultant group hired to examine the impact of OSU, shows that full-time students aren’t spending money so much on debauchery — hinted at by Ray and the presentation’s audience — as they are on off-campus housing.

The findings further illuminate a growing housing issue in Corvallis, where high demand fueled by skyrocketing student enrollment has caused rental prices to increase and availability to plummet — so much so that the area’s rental vacancy rate has hovered around 1 percent for much of the past year.

ECONorthwest gathered data from OSU’s financial aid and scholarships office and from university budget reports, including the estimated $9,444 students will pay for room and board, an average total that the financial aid and scholarships office determined after surveying students, examining local rental rates and using University Housing and Dining Services’ on-campus housing prices.

After subtracting on-campus housing and parking fees and various student fees, ECONorthwest found that the university’s students spent $250 million on off-campus expenditures in the 2010-11 academic year, said Paul Thoma, an economist for ECONorthwest, in an email.

Dividing that total by 22,977, the average number of full-time students enrolled at OSU’s Corvallis and Bend campuses during 2010-11, yields a total of $10,880 in off-campus expenses.

That total includes spending by students living on campus whose housing costs aren’t figured in to the nearly $11,000 average (on-campus students numbered 3,989 in fall 2010), and it takes into account spending on books and supplies, personal items, travel and miscellaneous fees.

Thoma said ECONorthwest did a similar study of the Oregon University System’s economic impact in 1998, which found that higher rental prices in Portland, Eugene and Corvallis meant that students at the three corresponding universities — Portland State, University of Oregon and OSU — on average spent more.

And 14 years later, rental prices in these three urban areas are typically higher than those in the smaller towns that house Oregon’s other public universities. And for the time being in Corvallis, those rates might continue to rise.

Research done by OSU’s University Housing and Dining Service found that average monthly rent for a two-bedroom, one-bath unit in Corvallis rose from $583 in fall 2001 to $750 in fall 2010. If that $750-a-month unit was rented for 12 months, the tenant would pay $9,000 total in rent alone.

Bob Loewen, rental housing specialist for the city of Corvallis, doesn’t have his own statistics for rental price increases, but he’s come across reports of rents rising anywhere from 10 to 50 percent in one year. And with no rent control laws in Oregon, such increases are legal.

Loewen said he tends to get many calls in the early fall and around December, typically from concerned parents of students resigning or looking for places to live who are surprised at escalating rent (as well as calls from senior citizens living on fixed incomes).

“They’re all shell shocked at the prices,” he said.

Contact Gazette-Times reporter Gail Cole at 541-758-9510 or gail.cole@gazettetimes.com.