Student Loan Blog : Arizona State University

$17,000 Obama Scholarship to Be Awarded to 1,600 Arizona Students

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:01:00 GMT

Arizona State University officials have decided to rename the school’s largest financial aid program after President Barack Obama in honor of his commencement address to ASU’s 2009 graduating class, reports The Arizona Republic (“1,600 ASU Freshmen Will Qualify for Obama Scholarship,” May 7, 2009).

Approximately 1,600 incoming ASU freshmen could now qualify for an award under the President Barack Obama Scholars Program, after the school increased the qualifying family income from $25,000 to $60,000. Worth up to $17,000, the need-based scholarship will cover tuition, fees, books, and room and board and will require recipients to take on a work-study job on campus.

The decision to rename the scholarship program came shortly after ASU began receiving negative publicity for not choosing to award President Obama with an honorary degree. ASU President Michael Crow apologized for the stir created by the university’s controversial decision but stood by his adherence to the school’s policy, which doesn’t allow for honorary degrees to be awarded to sitting politicians.

Crow says that the scholars program meets Obama’s goal of allowing more students to attend college. He said, “This is an important commitment on our part to make certain (that) students still have access to the universities.”

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Arizona Officials Respond to Students’ Need for Affordable College Options

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:45:00 GMT

To combat one of the most severe budget crises in its recent history, the state of Arizona is considering opening a fourth major university or converting an existing community college into a four-year school, The Arizona Republic reports (“Regents’ Plan: A New College,” May 6, 2009).

State legislators and Gov. Jan Brewer are pressing the Arizona Board of Regents — the governing board of the state’s three public universities — to come up with suggestions, by June, for how to create new “low-cost” and “university-quality” higher education options for Arizona students who are looking for a more affordable alternative to a traditional four-year degree at a research institution.

Arizona lags behind other states in the percentage of its population that holds a four-year degree: Only 25 percent of Arizona adults over the age of 25 have attained at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with the national average of 28 percent.

And for the nearly 125,000 students educated through Arizona’s public universities each year, the state’s three-school system, consisting of the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University, is much smaller compared to other states’.

Still, it wasn’t until recently, when the state started experiencing its budgetary problems and the three state universities started preparing for an additional round of steep tuition increases, that the Board of Regents felt the urgency to begin acting on proposed solutions that have been lingering for quite a while.

“Everything is on the table,” says Ernie Calderón, the Board of Regents incoming president.

And by “everything,” Calderón means the host of varied ideas that have been floated before the Board of Regents as possible courses of action:

Buy one of the schools in the Maricopa Community College system and turn it into a four-year institution

Convert one of Northern Arizona University’s remote campuses into a full-fledged, standalone university

Create a system of state colleges that award four-year degrees without a focus on research

Partner with a local municipality to develop an affordable four-year school system

The Maricopa Community College system has also been approached with the idea of creating a junior-senior college that would allow students who have already completed their two-year degree to finish their bachelor’s degree at a two-year school rather than at a four-year university.

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State Colleges Cut Staff, Programs as Budgets Slashed

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University who seven years ago promised to make ASU “The New American University” and to grow the school’s enrollment to 100,000 students by 2020, could see his plans go unfulfilled because of state budget cuts, reports The New York Times (“State Colleges Also Face Cuts in Ambitions,” March 17, 2009).

Since last June, ASU has lost $88 million in state funding, which amounts to 18 percent of the university’s base budget.

“The New American University has died; welcome to the Neutered American University,” the Arizona school’s student newspaper editorialized last month after ASU announced it would be eliminating more than 500 jobs, closing 48 programs and requiring remaining employees to take 10 to 15 days of unpaid leave this spring.

While ASU students said they believe school president Michael Crow is doing his best to protect them from further funding cuts, they also said the state’s budget cuts will negatively affect the quality of their education.

ASU Not Alone, Colleges Struggling Nationwide

Public colleges across the country are experiencing layoffs, salary freezes, and even enrollment reductions as they grapple with shrinking state funding in the current recession.

The University of Florida recently eliminated 430 faculty and staff positions, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, recently laid off around 100 employees, and the University of Vermont has eliminated 16 positions, left 22 faculty positions vacant, and frozen the salaries of certain staff, The New York Times reports.

And California’s higher education system, which serves 3.3 million students — nearly 20 percent of college student nationwide — is among the nation’s college systems hardest hit by this recession. Both the University of California system and the California State University system have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding and have been forced to shrink their enrollment numbers.

“What’s happening, everywhere, is what’s happening to Michael Crow,” said Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability, an organization that studies college spending. “The trend line is states disinvesting in higher education.”

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Proposed Budget Cuts Leave Arizona Universities Reeling

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:44:00 GMT

Arizona’s three state universities are considering making drastic budget cuts, including shutting down campuses and eliminating degree programs, as the colleges face a 30-percent reduction in state aid — a projected loss of more than $300 million for all three public universities.

Proposed budget cuts to the state’s university system come as Arizona grapples with a $3 billion-budget deficit this fiscal year and next, reports the East Valley Tribune (“Crow: Cuts Could Close ASU Polytechnic,” Jan. 21, 2009).

If the proposed budget cuts are approved, Arizona State University could lose $320 million over the next two years and Northern Arizona University nearly $50 million, while the University of Arizona stands to lose $103 million in state funds just this year.

The schools, which have already implemented budget reductions precipitated by the economic downturn, are scrambling to find new ways to further slash their already strained budgets.

ASU is considering laying off 2,500 employees, doubling tuition, and shutting down one, or possibly two, of its campuses.

“We could eliminate the nursing school, journalism school, the law school, and the engineering school and still not meet these cuts,” said ASU President Michael Crow. “It’s hard for people to understand the scale.”

“I’m a bit shell-shocked,” said NAU President John Haeger in a university press release. “We have not even modeled a budget for cuts of this magnitude.”

Haeger says the reductions at NAU won’t be possible without fee increases, fewer class offerings, and larger class sizes, as well as work furloughs, increased workloads for employees, and possible staff layoffs.

While it is not known how University of Arizona President Robert Shelton will address cuts the university needs to make, he says the school is exploring money-generating options, including accepting a larger number of out-of-state students who pay higher tuition and fees than in-state students.

Shelton says he agrees that cuts to higher education are needed, but he maintains that the type of reductions the state legislature is asking for “are so extreme that they would absolutely cripple higher education in our state.”

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Student Correspondents to Get National Exposure as ABC News Launches College Campus News Bureaus

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:08:00 GMT

In an effort to reach younger viewers, ABC News plans to open five multimedia news bureaus on select college campuses this fall.

Students at Arizona State University, Syracuse University, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Texas at Austin will have their work featured on various ABC News outlets, including “Good Morning America,” “World News With Charles Gibson,” and “Nightline,” as well as on ABC News Radio and ABCNews.com.

Students selected as bureau chiefs will receive on-site training at ABC News headquarters in New York.

The network hopes its college initiative will provide greater insight into the lives of the prized demographic of 33 million 18-to-25-year-olds living in the United States.

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Online Ordering Causing Mailroom Mayhem on College Campuses

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:46:00 GMT

The internet has completely changed the way college campuses operate, from class offerings and registration to college admissions and financial aid services. Now the technology is changing the way campuses deliver and receive mail. As more college students gravitate to online shopping, college and university mailrooms are overhauling their mail processing operations to accommodate the influx of packages.

Some pretty bizarre ones at that.

Car tires, barbecues, dishwashers, ant farms and air conditioners are just some of the orders college students are having mailed to their dorm rooms, according to a New York Times article by Jonathan D. Glater (“Majoring in Mailroom Management,” Nov. 21, 2007).

When students make their online purchases they often give little thought to the cost let alone the effect their shipping volume or types of packages they’re ordering will have on the mail processing centers at their schools. But for some schools, the adjustment has not been simple or cheap.

Revolutionizing the Mailroom At a Cost

The University of Southern California, for example, has experienced double the amount of their typical package volume in the last four years, expecting to process more than 67,000 packages by the end of this year. It has spent thousands of dollars adjusting their mail processing systems by building a new highly-complex mailroom almost as large as half a volleyball court for just one of their residence halls, Glater reports.

“Some folks don’t realize the logistical implications,” said Jeff Urdahl, the recently retired director of housing at USC, told the Times. “It’s a different world.”

Although online shopping statistics don’t exist for the college age demographic, according to shop.org, a division of the National Retail Foundation, internet buying increased nearly $220 billion last year and this year it is expected to top $259 billion.

And how are students paying for these purchases? Most interviewed for the Times article said their online shopping splurges are financed by college jobs, savings and parental allowances, but many students are also resorting to their good friends Visa, Master Card and American Express.

But students’ online ordering habits are not only affecting theirs and their parents’ bank accounts, they are also proving costly for the schools themselves. SUNY Binghamton spent $25,000 to implement a new bar code scanning system to track the increase of incoming packages, which rose from 33,000 in 2002 to 57,000 this year. Purchase College, also in New York, spent $37,000 on a similar system.

For Arizona State University, the second largest university in the country, the process became so cumbersome, the school chose to wash its hands clean of the mail distribution process and turned over all mail responsibilities to UPS.

Mindless Internet Shopping Hurts Students and Schools

The effect of students’ online spending is not isolated to schools; students’ bank accounts are taking huge hits as well. Credit and debit card use, necessary for online shopping, makes it much more difficult for students to keep track of their spending and their account balances.

Some students told the Times that they may buy something off the internet three times a week. This has led college students, according to Young Money, a student financial magazine, to have credit balances averaging $2,700, and as the popularity of internet shopping continues to rise, these numbers may only go up.

Students like Sarah Staton, a first year student at USC, don’t mask their online shopping activities; however they don’t quite seem to understand the effects it has on their finances.

“I do buy a lot of things, but it’s O.K. because I buy things that are cheap,” she told the Times. She admits to shopping on the internet more than two hours a day, especially for shoes. “How can I make a fashion statement if I don’t have the right shoes that match what I’m wearing?”

With this type of attitude, it looks like college mail centers and students will have to keep expanding their wallets.

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