The Seattle Pacific University Board of Trustees held a meeting in late February 2025 that saw the approval of a strategic plan regarding the future of Seattle Pacific University. The plan is meant to help SPU grow and bounce back to higher enrollment levels while staying committed to the university’s core themes.
According to SPU’s President, Deana L. Porterfield, this new plan was made in response to challenges SPU has faced over the past several years regarding lowering students enrolling at the university.
“What we’re trying to do is reposition the university to the size we are today,” Porterfield said. “So at one point we were 4000 undergraduate students. That’s pretty large, but you can’t sustain a 4000 footprint of the university when you have 1700 undergrad students.”
The financial situation at SPU was one of the biggest factors looked at for this meeting regarding the university’s future plans. Over the past few years, the university has seen continual deficit in its revenues to costs. Tuition was previously reduced by 25 percent and capped to a maximum of four percent increase every year to help attract more students.
“There was a repositioning of the tuition before I arrived here, and it’s a strategy that some schools use. If you look back, you’ll see that there was a lowering of the tuition by, I think 25 percent,” Porterfield said. “When you do that, you usually lower your scholarships as well. At the timing when we did this, it was just before the pandemic [initiated in the fall of 2021], and we did the opposite — we lowered the tuition and increased the scholarships.”
To help change the university’s unsustainable financial trend and decisions that have led to the university’s financial strains, President Porterfield aims to have the university increase tuition. This new strategy is looking into gradually reforming the university’s identity and relationship with its students and other universities and colleges.
“We [previously] positioned ourselves, which is fine, to become the least expensive institution, but, in doing that with our scholarship dollars going outside of the [university’s official] policies accelerating, you have to have something that makes sense financially to sustain the institution and to be able to do the things you’re doing,” Porterfield said. “So this year’s tuition, we’ve been increasing room and board very high over the last couple years. We said no room and board increase this year. General fees, the overall fees, all that staying the same. And we’re going to try to reposition ourselves within the market of the tuition.
This repositioning has already been occurring through the reorganization of SPU’s six schools into three colleges according to the SPU 135 plan, which was introduced in August of 2024. The year before that, SPU additionally initiated a plan to decrease its faculty and staff by 40 percent by June 2025.
Despite the cuts the university has seen and its increasing costs for students to attend, President Porterfield is hopeful that these necessary changes will be temporary and lead the university to greater heights.
“I have a board member that said she works in her mother’s rose garden, and when her mother was living, her mother said, Sometimes you have to cut back to come back,” Porterfield said. “Rose roses are like that. You have to trim a bush for it to flourish and have more brilliant, greater roses [grow]. Cutting back in order to reposition yourself is really hard and difficult, because we’re choosing between really good things, but clarity and focus helps you accelerate into the spaces that you need to go and that you’re hoping to go. And in this season, I get to be part of that mission.”
According to President Porterfield, many current students who are at SPU came because of financial reasons, but she sees SPU as having more to offer to students than just being cost effective.
“We’ve done some surveys, and in the past years, not this year as much it’s changed, and I think it’ll change going forward, but students chose us because we are the least expensive. That was one of the top reasons,” Porterfield said. “We have much more to offer than being least expensive, and I truly believe that. I think when they get here, they figure that out, but we are a top academic Christian institution with prestigious programs with outstanding faculty that leads students in research and help mentor and elevate them.”
