The city of Payson is waiting to hear from University officials if it will be chosen as the site of a new state college that ASU plans to build by fall 2011.
The Colleges@ASU plan was approved by the Arizona Board of Regents on Aug. 6 and will allow the University to start looking for locations to build new low-cost colleges across the state.
In addition to Payson, ASU officials are also looking at sites in Phoenix and Goodyear, Provost and Executive Vice President Elizabeth Capaldi said.
The goal, Capaldi said in an e-mail, is for ASU to provide programs to people who would be unable to otherwise afford them. She added that the programs at these outreach campuses will be more limited than programs at preexisting ASU campuses.
“There will be two or three of our most popular majors offered [at these colleges],” she said. “But no graduate programs and no technical programs such as engineering or nursing [will be offered].”
Payson Mayor Kenny Evans said the biggest benefit he sees for students is that tuition at these campuses will be about 50 to 60 percent lower than at main University campuses.
The city has been waiting for two years and has raised about $95 million to build the college campus, but there is still a lot to do before building can actually begin, he said.
“We have a 320-acre site in the prettiest forest of ponderosa pines in the country,” Evans said.
Now all the city needs is to select the third parties that will help build the school and the institution that would provide professors and curricula, he said.
While he hopes ASU is the institution that will lease the buildings, Evans said there are other institutions that have approached Payson and asked to be involved, though he declined to say which ones.
Evans said he hopes to see the ideas of a sustainable college be brought to Payson through this venture.
“This college would be an excellent addition to ASU’s repertoire of education — to have a college built from the ground up as a green and sustainable college,” he said. “So we’re not going to take the concepts of sustainability and teach it to [students] in a concrete, asphalt jungle in Tempe.”
Evans said he hopes the college will focus on what he thinks his city needs the most: rural health care and sustainability.
“We want to build a site where the concepts of sustainability can be taught in the real world way,” he said. Sustainability senior Taylor Cope agrees the idea of “green” facilities being built sustainably from the ground-up is not only feasible but completely necessary.
“Living in Tempe and learning about sustainability is kind of an oxymoron,” Cope said.
If the buildings in Payson were truly sustainable, in time they would put out so little energy that they could pay for themselves, he said.
“Building facilities such as these would be worthwhile from whatever angle you looked at it,” Cope said.
Reach the reporter at allison.gatlin@asu.edu.
