Ten years ago, tuition and mandatory fees for an incoming freshman at Arizona State University was $2,488. Ten years prior to that, it was $1,540. This year, freshmen dished out $8,128, according to the Arizona Board of Regent’s “Board-Approved Arizona University System 2010-2011 Base Tuition and Mandatory Fees.”
This trend can lead to only one conclusion: something is rotten in the state of Arizona.
On July 1, 2002, Michael Crow began his tenure as Arizona State University’s president. In his inaugural address, “A New American University: The New Gold Standard,” Crow revealed his unforgiving vision: hike tuition, and maybe financial aid will keep up.
In January 2003, predicting tuition hikes, Chapter 4, Section 104 of the ABOR’s Policy Manual was amended to state that “total mandatory undergraduate resident student tuition and fees shall not exceed the amount required to maintain a position at the top of the lower one-third of rates set by all other states for undergraduate resident tuition and mandatory fees at the senior public universities.”
Later in March, ABOR approved the presidents’ roughly 40 percent tuition hike, according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Students from the University of Arizona sued ABOR, the Arizona Board Of Regents, and the state of Arizona on the grounds that this hike conflicted with Article XI, Section 6 of the Arizona Constitution, stating that, “the University and all other state educational institutions […] shall be as nearly free as possible.”
In 2007, the Arizona Supreme Court dismissed the case, Kromko v. the Arizona Board of Regents, on the grounds that students must challenge ABOR’s policies that elicit tuition hikes.
However, there are glaring errors in how “nearly free” has been interpreted.
First, the policy only applies to resident undergraduates — prior to being amended, it applied to all resident students — limiting the scope of Arizona’s Constitution.
Second, the policy conveniently disregards the cost of attendance, leaving out burdens like mandatory on-campus living for freshmen, mandatory meal plans and differential tuition.
This is particularly troubling since a report authored by Crow titled, “The Future of the Research University: Meeting the Global Challenges of the 21st Century,” outlines how educational “enterprises” like ASU must compete for private investment. In turn, this overzealous expansion of public universities exposes students to market forces with no mechanism to protect them from the profit making incentive of the private sector.
Third, between 2000 and 2009, the median household income in Arizona increased 20.2 percent according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while tuition and fees during that time dramatically increased by 175 percent. ABOR refuses to fix this uneven relationship by not acknowledging this in their policy.
Instead, according to Robby Soave and Mark Flatten from the Goldwater Institute, ABOR symbolically continues to give top administrators at the universities pay increases even in the midst of budget cuts, a clear demonstration of which population ABOR is interested in serving.
According to Elma Delic on the ASA Chair blog, the Arizona Students’ Association is advocating that ABOR’s tuition setting process be bound by not exceeding 30 percent of the median family income.
Moving forward, students and their communities must recognize the unconstitutionality of ABOR’s operations and different ways to fight back. This includes but is not limited to protests, filing more lawsuits and massive awareness campaigns.
Who else will rise up in defense of public education?
Reach Athena at asalman@asu.edu
