The Arizona Board of Regents convened on the ASU campus Thursday and Friday to discuss future plans for the state universities, working with the state legislatures and reviewing growth and decline in the past year.
Legislation
The Regents discussed many pieces of key legislation that would potentially affect the universities in the upcoming session including HB 2548, which would essentially make minor restrictions to free speech rights. Regents, lead by Vice Chair Rick Myers, decided to oppose the legislation.
Some other legislation discussed was HB 2044, which regards data of K-12 schools, and HB 2023, involving fire codes that come in conflict with the universities.
Financial Aid
Financial aid was a key piece of discussion for the Regents. They looked at the statistical differences between students with need-based scholarship.
Crow emphasized that the universities do well with providing money for scholarships, but nearly no funding from the state to do so.
“In spite of all that we’ve done and all that we’ve achieved, we’re not doing as well compared to other places," Crow said.
According to ABOR statistics only $21 million comes from state, financial aid overall is about a $1 billion, so the state is only providing around 2 percent of aid.
They indicated that they may be looking to make some changes to the aid system to adjust the balance of merit-based aid and need-based aid.
Downtown expansion
Regents discussed very few details on the expansion of the downtown Phoenix campus, not elaborating on what's already been discussed.
However, they did voice their excitement and support of the addition.
"This strategic purchase is in anticipation of continued growth and success in the downtown campus," Myers said.
Reach the assistant news editor at megan.janetsky@asu.edu or follow @meganjanetsky on Twitter.
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