More than 100 attendees of yesterday's Arizona Board of Regents meeting dressed in red, in an attempt to show solidarity for efforts to save the School of Planning and give tuition waivers to graduate students.
Students and faculty from the School of Planning, some of whom attended the last regents' meeting in Phoenix, in September, sported the phrase "Save the School of Planning" on their red shirts.
Graduate students were there to request a full tuition waiver for the upcoming year.
Members of the School of Planning also brought people from the community to speak on the behalf of the program, which is slated for elimination as part of Focused Excellence.
Republican City Council member Kathleen Dunbar said the students in the planning program will continue to have a positive impact on the community if saved.
"Rio Nuevo is the perfect opportunity for students of planning," Dunbar said, referring to the revitalization project in downtown Tucson.
Sara Moore, the former director of the American Planning Association, said the potential elimination of the school is one of the "top five threats to professional planning."
She said Tucson can utilize planning graduates, since they are already familiar with the community.
"We need this program," Moore said.
The graduate students, who also attended in red, used examples of their own hardships to highlight the need for tuition waivers.
Jani Radebaugh, the president of the Graduate and Professional Student Council, told the regents that students who come to the UA for graduate programs are generally surprised by the tuition fees.
Radebaugh said that these fees could affect some students' decision to come to the UA.
Sami Sansevere, a graduate student in the English department, brought a copy of her paycheck and told the regents that, though her mother warned her when she was younger not to share financial information with others, she was going to make an exception.
She went on to detail her monthly budget.
Out of the paycheck, which was a little over $1,000 per month, her rent was more than $600.
After factoring in food, transportation, utilities and gas expenses for her and her husband, she said she had spent a dollar more than she had been paid.
She said that she was one of the lucky ones because a lot of graduate students she knows are at least $70 dollars in debt each month.
Last year, regents raised resident graduate student tuition by $1,250 and nonresident graduate student tuition by $1,500.
In other business, the regents discussed the implications of possible changes to the Higher Education Act.
The Higher Education Act was created by the U.S. Department of Education in 1965 to manage financial aid, strengthen universities and improve education.
Regent Gary Stuart made it clear that the legislature needs to understand the impact of a bill to reauthorize the education act that could restrict the regent's authority in determining tuition rates by limiting the amount tuition can be raised.
"The new legislation could change student aid in a very dramatic way," Stuart said.
If the bill is passed, the regents will have a much harder time raising tuition to meet their goal of getting the three universities' tuition rates to rank at the top of the bottom one-third of senior public universities.
Last year, regents raised tuition by $1,000 for resident undergraduates, the largest increase in UA history. The regents also changed their policies to increase the amount of money set aside for financial aid from 8 percent to 14 percent. The UA set aside 40 percent.
"If the Higher Education Act limits (tuition), we would find ourselves frozen," Provost George Davis said.
He said it would guarantee that Arizona universities stay behind peer universities in terms of tuition, which would affect other aspects of education.
"It's so easy to visualize," Davis said. Without an increase, "we would loose quality faculty, which would diminish the learning environment."
He also pointed out that faculty retention could remain an issue if tuition increases are limited.
Near the beginning of the meeting, Likins invited Peter Smith, a senior research scientist in the Lunar and Planetary Lab, to discuss the Phoenix project, a mission to Mars that was developed at the UA.
Smith's project won NASA's first Scout Mission Competition and will be on its way to Mars in the next few years.
Davis said Smith is exactly the type of person the UA could lose if revenue is not generated for faculty retention.
Other schools began recruiting Smith as soon as one week after the announcement that his project had won. Administrators scrambled to keep Smith at the UA, Davis said.
- Julie Wetmore contributed to this report.