ASU one hurdle from $54M budget request

Arizona State University is one step from getting its $54 million wish list filled by the state. The last step, however, is the trickiest. Gov. Janet Napolitano included all of the university’s major funding requests in her 2008 budget proposal, made public on Friday.

The package would cover the cost of educating ASU’s ever-expanding enrollment, launch initiatives aimed at keeping those students in school and increase their academic choices.

“It turns out that class size and faculty ratios affect retention dramatically. We’ve known that for a while but we haven’t had many options,” said ASU President Michael Crow. “The governor’s budget is attacking that.”

With Napolitano on board, there remain only 90 state legislators to convince.

Approving the state budget normally requires six months and a good deal of haggling between the Republican majorities in the Legislature and the Democratic governor.

Last year, the state’s public universities received tens of millions of dollars in new funding. This year, the universities built even more ambitious agendas.

Napolitano’s proposal calls for $29.8 million to provide raises to professors and graduate teaching assistants across the state’s university system — which includes ASU, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University. The raises would be on top of the 3.5 percent salary increases that the governor wants to provide all state employees.

For ASU, almost $17 million would pay to educate the thousands of new students expected to populate the university’s four campuses.

Crow wants to spend $15 million on efforts to keep students from dropping out.

ASU suffers one of the lowest freshman retention rates, 77 percent in 2004, of all major research public universities in the nation, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows. That means almost a quarter of all ASU students quit school after their first year.

The centerpiece of ASU’s retention effort is the creation of a new electronic advising system to replace the university’s error-prone network of student advisers.

Provost Betty Capaldi, the university’s top academic official, is building a computer system that will tell students what classes they need to graduate, when they need to take them and, if they want to change direction, how to switch their major.

Human advisers’ role will become one of discussing career and life options, rather than figuring out which classes cover a graduation requirement, Crow said.

Capaldi will model the system after one that she launched at the University of Florida in 1996, where she also served as provost.

Officials at the Gainesville university attribute dramatically improved retention to the computer system.

“Our graduation rate went from middling to very high for a large public university,” said Albert Matheny, advising center director at the University of Florida.

The money also would hire more professors to shrink freshmen class sizes and more advisers to make it easier for students to get information.

Napolitano also calls for the state to borrow $20 million to construct a building to house ASU’s new Del Webb College of Construction on the Tempe campus.

Doug Pruitt, chief executive officer at Tempe-based Sundt Construction, is helping to lead a private fundraising group working to match what the state spends.

The group, made up of local industry leaders, has already raised $16 million, Pruitt said.

Expanding the college is critical to remedy the state’s shortage of trained construction managers.

The governor “understands that if you want more biomedical facilities, hospitals, more roads, more bridges, more treatment plants, no matter what it is you want it’s gotta go through us,” Pruitt said. “And we don’t have enough people to build them.”