Oklahoma State University-Tulsa will offer one of the city’s first public four-year programs come January, thanks to a new state law.
OSU-Tulsa is launching 20 new courses for the spring semester and up to 70 in the next year, allowing students to get a bachelor’s degree at the same institution, start to finish. Tulsa Community College isn’t far behind, proposing its first four-year degree program — a bachelor’s degree in child development — to start in fall 2026.
Until now, the only four-year degree programs in Tulsa were at The University of Tulsa and Oral Roberts University, both private schools. Students pursuing public four-year degrees locally had to take lower-level classes at TCC before transferring to another site like OSU-Tulsa, University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, Langston University-Tulsa or Northeastern State University-Broken Arrow.
Signed into law this year, Senate Bill 701 opened the door to a more competitive market in Tulsa where students have more choices and schools have fewer restrictions. University administrators hope this change will boost Tulsa’s education outcomes.
“Especially because not a lot of Tulsans have higher education experience, have associate’s or bachelor’s degrees, I think it’s kind of confusing why there were these restrictions in the first place,” said Craig Freeman, vice provost and dean in the College of Professional Studies at OSU-Tulsa.
Previously, the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education had limitations for public universities. Schools couldn’t offer duplicate classes or majors, universities were largely limited to degree completion programs and colleges were limited to lower-level courses. To complete their degrees, students had to navigate transfers via partnerships between institutions.
SB 701 removed most of those restrictions when it went into effect Saturday. It allows the state to grant exceptions to universities looking to offer courses or degree programs outside previous restrictions. Sen. John Haste, R-Broken Arrow, authored the bill and has been working toward passing some variation of it for seven years.
Angela Sivadon, senior vice president and chief academic officer at TCC, says unwinding these restrictions has been a decade-long effort. Now that it’s happened, the college is turning its attention to early learning professionals, with long-term goals in health care.
“There’s a huge shortage of that,” Sivadon said. “And so we hope that through this first degree that we can help meet those needs in the area.”
TCC is starting slowly though, submitting only one bachelor’s proposal to the state. If approved, the college will need to be formally accredited to offer bachelor’s degrees.
“We want to do the first one and get good at that and be sure that we’re doing that properly,” Sivadon said. “There may be other conversations down the road about what is our next degree.”
OSU-Tulsa previously faced explicit restrictions in state law and could not offer duplicate courses to those at Langston-Tulsa or NSU-BA. Now, it’s incrementally expanding preexisting majors and working to add a full aerospace engineering degree. As a satellite campus of an accredited four-year university, it can move faster than TCC.
“It’s not a desire for us to crush anyone. It is a desire for us to meet demand,” Freeman said. “There’s so much unmet opportunity in Tulsa.”
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