Campaign FAQs

What is Believe It: The Campaign for Oregon State University?

Believe It is OSU’s second university-wide fundraising and engagement campaign.

This fundraising and engagement campaign aims to inspire OSU donors, volunteers, alumni and friends to:

Make an OSU education accessible to all learners and ensure all OSU students thrive
Create a vibrant campus community
Further our impact on communities in Oregon and around the world

Is this the first campaign for OSU?

This is OSU's second campaign. The first one concluded in 2014 and raised $1.1 billion to support students, faculty, programs and university priorities, including:

More than 600 scholarship funds
79 endowed faculty positions
More than two dozen facility projects

When did the Believe It campaign begin?

The first phase of Believe It: The Campaign for Oregon State University began in 2017. We celebrated its successes to date during the public launch celebration on Oct. 14, 2022.

How much has this campaign already raised?

As of October 2022, donors have given more than $1 billion to support university priorities.

What is this campaign’s goal for philanthropic gifts?

Oregon State University and the OSU Foundation seek to raise $1.75 billion in the Believe It campaign.

How does the campaign plan on meeting engagement goals?

This campaign seeks to deepen alumni and other supporters’ involvement in ways that advance student success and a sense of belonging to the larger OSU community of 200,000+ alumni and 300,000 parents and friends all over the world. Volunteers recruited through the campaign, for example, will serve as career mentors for students and recent graduates and help alumni to become advocates for the university.

Who does this campaign benefit?

Donor support will advance OSU priority initiatives, including student access and success, faculty, academic programs, research, statewide community engagement programs, OSU Athletics and facilities on OSU’s Corvallis campus and OSU-Cascades campus in Bend.

What is the breakdown of how the $1.75 billion will be distributed?

The OSU Foundation anticipates that donor support will fund the following university priorities:

$460 million for student support, including scholarships, fellowships and experiential learning funds
$500 million for faculty positions and academic program support funds
$320 million for new facilities, renovations and equipment
$250 million for emerging strategic initiatives
$220 million for outreach and extension that will benefit Oregon and beyond

What will the new Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex make possible?

Named the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex in recognition of the couple’s $50 million gift in support of the new center on the Corvallis campus, the center will position the university to solve global challenges in fields for which it is internationally recognized, including climate science, oceanography, sustainability and water resources.

I hear there is a supercomputer being employed. What is that all about?

Facilitating team-based research in artificial intelligence, robotics and materials science, the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex center will employ a next-generation NVIDIA supercomputer to support faculty in addressing highly complex and challenging computational problems. The OSU supercomputer – powered by next-generation NVIDIA CPUs, GPUs and networking – is expected to be among the world’s fastest university supercomputers.

What is the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts?

During the campaign launch celebration, OSU announced that the 49,000-square-foot arts and education complex currently under construction on the Corvallis campus will be called the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts in recognition of Reser’s previously anonymous $25 million gift for the facility. Scheduled to open in spring 2024, the facility will serve as a statewide portal to the arts and support the university’s historically unique STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) education opportunities.

How was the campaign launch event and large tent on the MU Quad funded?

The tent and launch events are funded by sponsorships and private philanthropy through the OSU Foundation. No tuition, student fees or state funds were used.