SALEM — College is coming, and it’s coming fast for Katherine Cleland and her family, who are worried about the poor performance of a state college fund that was supposed to earn money to help pay much of the cost.

Cleland has two daughters, one a freshman in high school, the other a junior. The oldest is tossing around a few top choices: Tufts University in Boston, Brown in Rhodes Island, and American University in Washington, D.C., just to name a few.

“My daughter has always wanted to go out of state,” Cleland said. “She could do it. She could pull it off. We just want to give her those opportunities.”

That, it turns out, is the hard part.

Cleland has been saving for college ever since her daughter was born, but a poorly performing Oregon Savings Plan has dealt a hard blow to that reserve. In the span of about a year, she has seen it shrivel from about $50,000 to somewhere around $36,000.

Overall, the College Savings Plan has lost about 25 percent of its worth in the past few months.

But the piece receiving the most attention is the Oppenheimer Core Bond Fund, which lost 38 percent of its value when comparable funds posted a gain of about 4 percent. That translated into a loss of about 9 percent for one of the plan’s most conservative portfolios.

On Friday, the Oregon House Education Committee held a public hearing about the savings plan, and that fund in particular. The objective, said the chairwoman, state Rep. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, was to air the issue in public.

“The attorney general will be doing an investigation and will be asking a lot of questions, but the people of Oregon” won’t be able to sit in, Gelser said. “What I’m interested in is ‘Is there a way to help some of these families?’”

The hearing came one day after the board in charge of the plan scrapped the Oppenheimer Core Bond Fund, and put out notice that it might replace Oppenheimer as the plan’s provider.

Representatives from OppenheimerFunds defended their management of the Core Bond Fund, just as they did the day before at the Oregon 529 College Savings Board meeting.

“I want to assure this committee that the funds were managed in accordance with their investment guidelines,” said Donna Winn, an OppenheimerFunds representative. “We believe they were an appropriate investment in various portfolios.”

Added former State Treasurer Randall Edwards: “No one saw this coming.”