Phil and Penny Knight Commit $1 Billion to Create an Engineering College at the University of Oregon
The Nike co-founder and his wife pledged $1 billion, described by the university as the largest gift ever made to a comprehensive public university, to establish a College of Engineering focused on bioengineering and other high-demand fields.
CommunityGNGV Editorial Team4 min readLast reviewed September 28, 2026
The University of Oregon is about to gain a full engineering college, thanks to one of the largest gifts in the history of American higher education. On September 23, 2026, the university announced that Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, have committed $1 billion to establish a College of Engineering. The university describes it as the largest gift ever made to a comprehensive public university.
The new college will be based at the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact in Eugene. It will focus on bioengineering and other high-demand engineering disciplines, integrating engineering with basic sciences, data science and medicine. Students will also be trained in communication, entrepreneurship and ethics, with the aim of moving discoveries out of the lab and into therapies, technologies and companies.
The gift builds on a long relationship between the Knights and the university. The couple previously gave $500 million in 2016 to create the Knight Campus and another $500 million in 2021 to expand it. Since 2016 the campus has graduated the first engineers in the university's history and now hosts 17 research laboratories and more than 500 students and trainees each year.
Announcing the gift, Phil Knight spoke about the role of universities at a difficult time for higher education funding. “To make an audacious dream a reality requires more than a vivid imagination. It also requires the sort of opportunity that our great American universities, both public and private, have historically provided,” he said, adding, as reported by Fortune: “This is no time to abandon them.”
The university has not yet published a detailed timeline for when the first students will enrol in the new college. But for a state that, as reporting has noted, needs more engineers, and for students who will be able to train close to home, the commitment is a long-term investment in education, research and opportunity.
Why it matters
A fully funded engineering college gives Oregon students a new route into high-demand careers and strengthens the link between university research and new therapies and technologies.
Sources
What you can do
Read the university's announcement at the source; if you are a student, explore engineering and science programmes at public universities near you.
