Lottery scholarship plan to take top bill, legislator says

Leigh-Anne Brown Arizona Daily Wildcat Rep. Jeff Groscost and UA President Peter Likins met yesterday to discuss higher education issues. Groscost recently proposed a plan that would use the state lottery to fund tuition for college students.

House Speaker Jeff Groscost, R-Mesa, on a day-long trip to Tucson said his plan would provide tuition to public universities statewide for Arizona high schoolers who maintain a "B" average.

"I think you'll see that dominate," Groscost said, adding response to his Nov. 3 proposal has been positive, but that specifics still need to be drafted.

His proposal would have Arizona adopt a system like one in Georgia that pays tuition, fees and book costs for 128,000 state college students using lottery proceeds.

Groscost, elected to the speaker's post in October, was in Tucson yesterday to meet with UA President Peter Likins and several other local groups.

Likins said he could not comment on Groscost's plan, but that the Georgia system has been "very helpful" to that state's universities.

The two men met for an hour yesterday morning and discussed "opportunities" to improve the state's university system in the coming session, Groscost said.

Likins said Groscost made it clear the House would be receptive to new ideas from the UA, if university administrators could prove a proposition's benefit.

Groscost said he expected the Legislature to hit some post-secondary education issues during the coming session including university funding, improving discourse between community colleges and universities as well as among universities themselves.

He said, for example, the state's three universities could work together to create an engineering program to compete with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.