PORTLAND — The University of Oregon is launching an ambitious new program that would allow lower-income students to attend the state’s flagship campus tuition free, beginning with next year’s freshman class.

Details of the new initiative are still sparse. University President Dave Frohnmayer is scheduled to release more information at a news conference next month.

But Julie Brown, director of media relations for the university, said Thursday the idea is to phase in a program that would cover tuition and fees for students who meet eligibility levels for the federal Pell grant, given to low-income college students. For the 2007-2008 academic year, tuition and fees at the school are $6,174.

Selected students could also get enough grant money to cover room and board, estimated at about $11,000 per year.

Universities across the country have put similar programs in place, but it’s far more common in selective private schools, such as Harvard or Princeton, where costs can top $40,000 a year.

Only a handful of elite public universities have similar programs, including the University of North Carolina and the University of Washington. At the University of Virginia, the school pays 100 percent of education costs for students who come from families with an income that is at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that’s an annual income of about $40,000 per year.

The Charlottesville school began the program three years ago; since then, applications from low-income students have increased 36 percent.

Tuition and fee costs at Oregon have increased 47 percent since 2001. A study released this spring by the Oregon Student Association found that the average Oregon university student graduated with $19,420 worth of debt; overall, 67 percent of students reported carrying at least some debt.

Tamara Henderson, executive director of the Oregon Student Association, said that at first blush, the University of Oregon’s proposal sounded promising, and “very exciting for students.”

But she said she was also concerned that such a plan could lure students away from regional universities in Monmouth, La Grande and Ashland, some of which have been struggling to stay afloat after losing enrollment.

It’s also not clear how university officials intend to fund the new initiative, though the school is in the middle of a six-year capital campaign, which has so far raised $717 million.

Frohnmayer has also been pushing to deregulate tuition statewide. Though it is now set by the state Board of Higher Education, and approved by the legislature, Frohnmayer has said he’d prefer that each of the state’s seven universities have the flexibility to set their own tuition and fee rates.

Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a nonprofit that focuses on collegiate issues, said where such programs do exist at public universities, they are often at least partly funded by tuition dollars from other students.

Symbolically, initiatives like the Eugene plan are significant, she said, but at a practical level, campuses like the University of Oregon attract relatively few of the state’s poorest students.

“It is not going to make a huge dent until you get it to the community college level, and the open access universities,” she said.

Earlier this month, Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski made the rounds of the state’s campuses to promote a new program aimed at helping lower and middle income students statewide pay for college.

The idea is that students will have to help pay for their college education, putting as much as they’d earn from working 40 hours a week during the summer, and 10 to 15 hours a week during the school year at a minimum wage job toward their tuition bill.

Their parents would also be required to ante up, within a family’s financial limits, and students would be expected to seek the maximum from federal Pell Grant funding.

But after all those options had been tapped, the state will kick in the rest of their tuition bill.

Under that program, known as the Oregon Opportunity Grant, a student leaving a four-year school would be carrying an average debt of about $13,000.