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The Oregon Graduate Institute is now known as the OGI School of Engineering of the Oregon Health and Science University . OGI, as it is known, merged with Oregon Health and Science University in the late 1990s in search of financial stability. The OGI is located in Hillsboro, just west of Portland. When the campus originally opened in the early 1970s, it was surrounded by farmland. Since then, Portland has grown, and the campus is nearly surrounded by surburbia.
Before the merger, OGI was a private, stand-alone, science-only, graduate-only institution. Not having any undergraduates, used by many private schools as cash cows to pump steady streams of money into the budget, the school lived on a hand-to-mouth financial model, and was dependent on research grants, politicians such as Mark Hatfield and philanthropists such as Jean Vollum, the founder of Tektronix. Not surprisingly, more than a few students and faculty suffered immense financial pressures, adding to the already Kafka-like reality of graduate school.
OGI is still undergoing some realignment from the merger, but its main areas of focus are computer science, biochemistry and environmental engineering. It has a full-time student body of about 350, with about 1/3 of those seeking PhDs.
