ASU President Michael Crow said the University is ready to make tuition different for each academic level and degree program as soon as next fall, the first step in his 10-year plan to increase access to ASU.
"We realize and want different price points," Crow said when presenting ASU's redesign plan to the Arizona Board of Regents at NAU Thursday.
This would make it easier for individuals to access the University programs that are focused on their own interests, he said.
ABOR first approved tuition differentiation between Arizona's three universities in April, but it could now be applied according to individual colleges and year levels.
The proposal for expanded tuition differentiation passed ABOR's approval along with other aspects of Crow's 10-year plan, including getting rid of the idea of a "main" campus.
"Every campus you will go to will be an ASU school to avoid the plague of tiering," Crow said. "Each school will have its own niche."
The plan will also designate different missions for each of the ASU campuses while maintaining unity between them.
"The differentiated mission process has put us on a new trajectory," Crow said.
The plan will make research the highest priority at the Tempe campus by attempting to expand to more than 1 million square feet of new research space in the next five years and moving from $185 million to $350 million in research initiatives, Crow said.
The focus of the West campus will be "Creative Excellence," he added. This campus would concentrate more on the liberal arts and interdisciplinary schools.
Crow said the Polytechnic campus would direct its goal to the applied sciences, like technology, biomedicine and other specialty fields.
With its 700 acres of land space "it could grow into a mammoth campus," he said.
Crow said the Downtown campus would focus on public service.
Although he admitted students might be wary of attending the extended campuses at first, thinking the quality of education would not be the same, Crow said there would be "equally good stuff on all the campuses."
While the same majors will not be available on all the campuses, the quality of degrees will be comparable.
"A student can get a degree in English or something that looks like English on all campuses," he said.
A major spotlight of the redesign plans is expanding outreach, Crow said.
The Arizona university system wants to increase access to all qualified residents by enhancing graduation rates, expanding diversity, establishing a relationship with community colleges and advancing freshman retention.
Crow said it is not high prices, but the access -- how easy it is to attend a university -- that makes it a great institution.
"Access at all levels of society has never been higher," Crow said. "It is through our resources that access can be achieved."
NAU President John Haeger said he supports the idea of increased access to baccalaureate degrees.
"Higher education is affordable in the state right now," he said.
Crow said the "real fight" is getting the University index, the percentages of different minorities attending ASU, to match the state index and to get more diversity in the University by expanding resources and overcoming the low performance of all Arizona education institutions, like low retention and graduation rates.
"The key is well-organized, well-implemented, well-spent resources," Crow said.
UA President Peter Likins said the university system should send an outreach program to students in grades four through eight, but the resources should not come out of tuition because students would not understand the reasoning.
Other focuses of the 10-year plan include increasing enrollment.
According to the redesign plans, the Tempe campus will remain at about 50,000 students (currently at 51,000), the West campus will grow from about 7,000 students to 20,000, the Polytechnic campus will grow from almost 4,000 to 20,000 students and the Downtown Phoenix campus will have up to 15,000 students.
"ASU's mission is one of duality," Crow said. "We want high-quality university-level education while remaining aggressively inclusive."
Reach the reporter at tara.brite@asu.edu.
