U of A cash reserves to drop by $50M; administrative unit budgets cut 10-15%

The University of Arizona’s cash reserves are expected to drop an additional $50 million this coming year, with the university expecting to register just 67 days of cash on hand.

The cash reserves for the university will shrink from $550 million to $500 million, which is “very much where I would like to stop,” UA Interim Chief Financial Officer John Arnold told the Arizona Board of Regents Thursday.

The regents approved the new budgets for the UA, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University at Thursday’s meeting. ASU and NAU have days cash on hand projections of 163 days and 170 days, respectively. The regents require 140 days of cash on hand for the universities.

The academic units at the UA are seeing cuts of about 3.5%, while the administrative units will be cut between 10% and 15%.

The university is facing a deficit of $163 million. It is projected to cut the deficit to $52 million by the end of next year. In fiscal year 2026, the UA hopes to completely eliminate the deficit, Arnold said.

The university is seeing a $6.6 million cut to its main campus budget, a $1.5 million cut to its UA Health Sciences programs, a $4 million cut to the guaranteed scholarship “Arizona Promise” program and a $1.5 million cut to the Arizona Teachers’ Academy. Those cuts are coming from the newly approved state budget.

Arnold said the UA can expect additional cuts totaling $14.7 million next year, in fiscal year 2026. Those cuts are expected to affect cooperative extension programs; AZ Healthy Tomorrow, which was aimed to increase the medical school; and a cancer engineering project. Arnold said the university will start “talking about winding down programs impacted” by these cuts by July 1, 2026, once funding ends.

By the end of June, Arnold said, the university will publish all administrative budgets. That information was expected to come out at the end of May but was delayed. In July, the UA will publish a “budget book” that will memorialize all of the actions taken this year. Also, on July 1, Arnold will begin his tenure as the university’s first chief operating officer, at a salary of $550,000.

“I’m incredibly grateful to everyone in the UA community that has participated in this very painful process, but I think it’s going to set us up well for the future and I am optimistic that we will be back to a balanced budget and replenishing our reserves in the coming future,” UA President Robert C. Robbins told the Board of Regents Thursday.

Among the actions taken, the university has ended its tuition guarantee program and established “budget maintenance and accountability programs” that will be implemented in the fall.

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Budget highlights, according to Arnold’s presentation, include consolidating IT, HR and redesigning financial aid. The university has also made “key investments” in international students, the Eller College of Management, the iSchool and the nursing program.

Student organizations

Also at Thursday’s ABOR meeting, a policy called the “Prohibition on Support for Foreign Terrorist Organizations by Student Groups and Organizations” received its first of two necessary approvals to become board policies governing the state’s three public universities.

Under the pending policy, all students, including those who are “perceived to be Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab or Palestinian, must be provided a school environment free from discrimination based on race, color or national origin, including shared ancestry.”

The policy would prohibit student groups from “knowingly (providing) material support to a designated terrorist organization.” They could not call for violence and/or genocide against any individual group and “engage in or promote in person or in any other medium, including but not limited to social media, threats of genocide or harm against any student based on their race, color, national origin or shared ancestry.”

New programs

The regents also formally accepted new program requests from the UA.

The following programs will be newly offered:

A bachelor of science in real estate, a bachelor of arts in molecular and cellular biology, a bachelor of science in nursing in collaborative nursing education, a master of science and PhD in computer science and engineering, a master of arts in sport and recreation leadership, a bachelor of science in nutrition and dietetics, a bachelor of science in nutrition and wellness, and a bachelor of arts and science in justice and global security.

The UA also received approval to add a master’s of science in marriage family therapy and in midwifery for the fall 2025 semester. The new School of Global Studies was also approved.

“Each of these new programs has been fully accounted for in the university’s (fiscal year) 2025 budgets,” the UA’s proposal stated. “The programs included in this submission make extensive use of existing faculty and courses, and the university is confident they will have strong enrollments.”