The new state budget cuts higher education funding, including programs to increase access for students and to help address the teacher shortage in Arizona.
The budget reduces state funding to the three universities as well as to programs led by the Arizona Board of Regents, as the Legislature made cuts across the board to agencies in state government in order to deal with a deficit.
The University of Arizona will see just under $8 million in cuts to its main campus and its health sciences center. Arizona State University faces just under $11 million in cuts, and Northern Arizona University will see about $4 million in cuts.
The Arizona Promise Program and the Arizona Teachers’ Academy program aren’t disappearing but won’t get the funding they did last year, of $20 million and $15 million, respectively. State government had a surplus last year when that one-time funding was provided.
Arizona Promise program
The Arizona Promise Program provides full scholarships to Pell eligible Arizona high schoolers with a GPA of at least 2.5 to ASU, NAU and the UA. The program is an unfunded mandate, meaning even with the cuts, the universities still must provide the scholarships.
This means the three universities will have to find the money to provide those scholarships from their own budgets. For the UA, which is facing a deficit of $162 million, that could be tricky.
“We are big supporters of Arizona Promise and depending on the final budget, we will find a way to fund that,” said Mitch Zak, a spokesperson for the UA, speaking the week before the Legislature finalized the budget. “I don’t know how that will take place yet. A determination will be made after the budget is enacted and by our financial experts.”
Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the regents, said the program is valuable.
“The Arizona Promise Program is the state’s first and only statewide financial aid program,” she said. “The value of a university degree has never been higher, and this program represents the board’s promise that cost won’t be a barrier for low-income Arizona students and families.”
Arizona Teachers’ Academy
The Arizona Teachers’ Academy offers full tuition coverage for students who agree to teach in Arizona schools after graduating from one of the three state universities or a handful of two-year colleges, including Pima Community College.
Now, it appears, the program will have a longer waitlist and will be harder to access due to its $15 million funding loss.
The program, which guarantees a job after graduation, helps address the state’s teacher shortage. According to the Arizona Personnel Administrators Association, there were more than 9,600 teaching positions open for the 2022-23 school year. After one month into the school year, the organization reported that almost one-third of teaching positions remained unfilled.
Forty-two percent of those open spots were filed by teachers who did not meet the standard teaching requirements.
In March, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said the teacher shortage was a “potential catastrophe” requiring immediate attention.
According to ABOR spokesperson Gilbertson, Arizona needs “great teachers in our classrooms and the academy is a significant pathway to produce more quality teachers for our children.”
Arizona Healthy Tomorrow program
Not all programs are seeing cuts, however. While the Arizona Healthy Tomorrow program is not specifically written into the state budget, line items providing “one time funding” are generally understood to be for the program.
The Arizona Healthy Tomorrow program is meant to double the graduates at the UA medical schools as well as help fund the creation of medical schools at ASU and NAU.
The UA can expect to receive $14.7 million of that one-time funding to be used for the program. ASU is likely to receive $21.2 million, and NAU is set to receive $10.1 million.
All three universities, “on or before” Sept. 1, must “provide a detailed expenditure plan to the joint legislative budget committee that includes a description of the intended purposes and the estimated costs of each expenditure,” according to the budget draft.
The Healthy Tomorrow program intends to “rapidly grow the healthcare workforce with the creation of two new medical schools and increased medical school graduates,” according to the ABOR website.
An estimated 3 million Arizonans have limited access to primary care and more than one in three Arizona hospitals face a critical staffing shortage.
According to research by the UA Center for Rural Health, Arizona had a shortage of 560 primary care physicians last year and 1,941 more will be needed by 2030 because of “retirements, population increases, higher rates of chronic disease and an aging population.”
Arizona is ranked 42nd in the country in total active primary care physicians, meeting just 39% of its need, according to the UA Center for Rural Health.
“The board created the AZ Healthy Tomorrow initiative to train the thousands of additional doctors, nurses and health-care professionals our state needs,” ABOR spokesperson Gilbertson said. “We support public and private investments in our public universities to educate, train and deploy these health-care workers to communities across Arizona.”
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