Purchases land and buildings from University of Western States

McMinnville, OR and Portland, OR • Linfield College announced Monday that it has agreed to purchase the University of Western States campus in Northeast Portland.

University of Western States will lease back the facilities until May of 2020, when Linfield will take possession. The Linfield-Good Samaritan School of Nursing has been located at Northwest Portland’s Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center since 1982, and the nursing program will continue to operate in that location for the remainder of this academic year and the next.

“This was a once-in-a-century opportunity for us to expand in Portland,” said Miles K. Davis, Linfield College president. “It guarantees that our school of nursing will have a secure home, and it gives us additional opportunities to expand in the state’s largest metropolitan area.”

The facilities at the existing Linfield-Good Samaritan School of Nursing are at full capacity, leaving the college’s nursing programs with long waiting lists.

“In the United States, nursing schools turn away more than 64,000 students each year, largely due to insufficient classroom space, faculty and clinical preceptors,” said Kim Dupree Jones, Linfield’s dean of nursing. “Oregon has similar challenges. Our new campus will allow us to significantly expand to meet the healthcare needs of Oregonians. The timing of our new campus is critical as one quarter of Oregon’s registered nurses and one half of Oregon nursing faculty plan to retire in the next decade.”

This investment represents Linfield’s most significant expansion since 1998, when Linfield acquired 115 acres next to its McMinnville campus through a gift and purchase agreement with the Hewlett-Packard Corporation. The University of Western States campus has 10 buildings, including a new lecture hall and a state-of-the-art anatomy laboratory, and is zoned for educational purposes and student housing.

Linfield’s nursing degree is one of its most popular, with 44 percent of the class of 2018 earning a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. The number of students majoring in nursing has increased 27 percent over the past decade, and in 2018, Linfield’s online RN-to-BSN degree was named the top program on the west coast by BestValueSchools.com.

Many Linfield students majoring in nursing spend their first two years at the McMinnville campus and the final two years in Portland. There are no plans to alter that arrangement, which ensures students, regardless of major, are rooted in traditional liberal arts and have collaborative, service and experiential learning opportunities.

Founded in 1858, Linfield is a four-year independent college with campuses in McMinnville and Portland. Twenty-five percent of Linfield students are first-generation college students, and more than one-third are U.S. students of color. The U.S. State Department honored Linfield for being Oregon’s top producer of Fulbright Scholars in 2017-18.