ASU President Michael Crow visited the Downtown Phoenix campus on Monday for a student forum to answer questions about tuition, campus development and future university partnerships, among other discussion topics.
Students were able to gather in designated locations for live-streaming events, offering students from the Polytechnic, West, Thunderbird and Tempe campuses the chance to be involved in the conversations. The five campuses were each allotted three student questions.
Christine Langevin, a junior nonprofit leadership and management major, asked Crow for concrete examples of what ASU will do to prevent tuition increases for students, saying she didn’t “want to talk in large concepts.”
“These aren’t large concepts that I’m giving you,” Crow said. “These are things that we’ve already done.”
Crow said there would be no tuition increases for in-state students and only a 1 percent increase for others.
“The notion for the in-state students is to keep that cost as low as possible so that the average in-state tuition for an undergraduate student is under $4,000 a year,” Crow said.
He emphasized that the model that ASU’s tuition was based on is heavily reliant on financial aid in order to bring lower income students to the university.
Justin Steckman, a senior at the Walter Cronkite School, was satisfied by Crow’s responses to student concerns.
“(He is) somebody who cares deeply about each individual student and really does his best to make this the best New American University,” Steckman said.
Crow was asked about plans for upcoming partnerships, inspired by ASU’s partnership with Starbucks that offers full-time employees free online classes.
“We have a few things in the works,” he said. “Nothing that we’re ready to announce yet, but we have a few things in the works — all of which are projects that exemplify what we stand for which is excellence and accessibility.”
Contact the reporter at Sydney.Abeyta@asu.edu.
