Students in specialized programs such as nursing may pay more for their education, under a plan released yesterday by top administrators.

They will propose later this year that the Arizona Board of Regents approve a higher tuition rate for nursing students, and may recommend extra fees for law, business and pharmacy students, Provost George Davis said.

Davis joined President Pete Likins and Senior Vice President for Business Affairs Joel Valdez yesterday in calling for those fees. They also proposed the implementation of 18 other strategies for improving the UA's financial situation.

Those other plans include continuing to set differentiated tuition for graduate and professional programs, searching for sources of money to reverse a trend of small raises for faculty members and charging a fee for all in-state applicants for admission.

Yesterday's announcement was the final of four documents detailing administrators' plans for narrowing the UA's mission and directing it toward greater financial independence from the state legislature.

Administrators did not specify how high they would request the regents to set fees for nursing students.

In the nursing college, students reacted with disappointment when hearing their program had been targeted for higher fees.

"I think tuition needs to go up for in-state (students)," said Lindsay Piane, a nursing junior. "But I think it's a bummer that they will pick on the nursing college."

Another student wondered why nursing tuition would be disproportionately raised when a nursing shortage is plaguing the state and much of the nation.

"Why are they going to deter students from going into a field that is already in dire need of professionals?" said Christy Garry, a nursing senior.

Also likely to face higher tuition rates are students in graduate and professional programs, where Likins has said tuition should be determined based on other schools' prices.

He hopes that by charging a market-based tuition, graduate and professional programs can become more self-sustaining, a move that would allow administrators to divert funding back into undergraduate programs.

"Increases in fees are needed to provide adequate support to our library, to maintain our technological infrastructure and support, to maintain the high quality of instruction at the College," Kay Kavanagh, an associate dean of the James E. Rogers College of Law, wrote in an E-mail.

Likins must release all his proposals for tuition increases by Monday.

The announcement that administrators will look within the university, in addition to the legislature, to find money for faculty salary raises came as welcome news to Jerrold Hogle, who chairs the Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee.

The UA will still lobby the legislature to pay for better salaries, Hogle said. But few expect that Arizona lawmakers, who have cut in excess of $44 million from the university's budget in the last two years and still face a billion-dollar budget crisis, will come up with the money soon.

"We want to get them from the state, lord knows, and we're not going to stop fighting for them," said Hogle, a distinguished professor of English.

Dwindling faculty salaries have long been a concern at the UA, where dozens of faculty members, including one who later won a Nobel Prize, left the university for higher-paying jobs elsewhere. According to the document released yesterday, the average UA faculty salary is 10 percent below the average at peer institutions.

Internal funding that helps cover salaries could assist in reversing that process, but Hogle warns it is far from a cure-all.

"It's part of a solution," he said.

Yesterday's document also included plans for charging potential in-state students a fee for filing an application. Out-of-state applicants are already assessed a fee, but Likins, Davis and Valdez wrote that requiring in-state applicants to pay would help offset the costs of a more inclusive admissions process.

Last week, the Arizona Board of Regents discussed giving the state's three universities more freedom to decide which applicants to admit. For the UA, that will likely mean trying to admit a more diverse student body and looking more individually at applications.

Cara O'Connor and Keren G. Raz contributed to this report.