WUE Tuition Discounts

Western Undergraduate Exchange (WUE) website: https://www.wiche.edu/wue

Founded in 1987, the Western Undergraduate Exchange (WUE, pronounced “woo-ee”) is a regional tuition-discount agreement administered by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). WUE enables students from one of 16 WICHE states and territories in the Western U.S. to enroll as nonresidents in 160+ participating public colleges and universities and pay 150 percent (or less) of the enrolling school’s resident tuition—which annually saves students an average of $9,000 each on the cost of nonresident tuition.

Archived Q&A and Reviews


What are the requirements for getting a WUE scholarship?

May 2014

My son (an SF public HS junior) dreams of going out of state to a public university in Montana, Utah, Oregon, or another scenic western state that's not CA. His grades are medium. Does each school have different criteria for the WUE tuition discount? What kind of grades / test scores are required? There's no real info about this on the wiche.edu website or the college websites i've looked at. Rachel


Yes, each school is different, and even programs or departments within a single school may have different requirements. If you can't find what you need on the WUE website, go to the financial aid pages of the specific schools. Wendy


I am not an expert on this topic, but we did look into it and found plenty of information on the site here: http://wue.wiche.edu/search_results.jsp?searchType=all You have to look at each school and see what they offer because, yes, they do all treat it differently. My initial impression is that the really popular schools (Univ of Oregon, Univ of CO, University of AZ, etc) only offer for very select majors or not at all. Many do offer it in the form of a scholarship, rather than a flat tuition reduction. You will have to investigate based on the schools you are interested in. college mom