Arizonans who left a state university partway through a degree will get more help finding their way back under a new federal grant to the Arizona Board of Regents.
The board said Tuesday it has won $3.97 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. The money expands the AZ Comeback Initiative, which the board runs with Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona. Arizona's award was one of nine made through the department's Postsecondary Student Success Grant program.
The focus is former students who are close to finishing, who have earned 60 to 89 credits toward a bachelor's. The regents say more than 726,000 Arizonans started a degree and left before finishing.
What changes
The board will run one career-focused coaching approach at all three schools that follows returning students from re-enrollment to graduation. WestEd, an outside research group, will evaluate whether it works.
The grant is more than three times the $1.1 million from the Helios Education Foundation that started the initiative last year and paid for a pilot at each campus. Those efforts continue:
- ASU's Operation Comeback assigns reentry specialists who review past credits, transferable courses and unpaid balances, and offers per-credit tuition scholarships. ASU says a record 10,733 students returned last year after at least a semester away, and more than 600 came back through the earlier pilot.
- NAU's Jacks on Track pairs former students who have 90 or more credits with advisers who build a completion plan.
- The University of Arizona's Arizona Comeback program helps former students re-enroll in Tucson or through Arizona Online.
"Many Arizonans stepped away from college to care for family, support themselves or manage the cost of school, not because they lacked the drive to finish," regents Chair Doug Goodyear said in the announcement.
The board pointed to an upcoming Rounds Consulting Group report projecting that Arizona employers will need about 128,400 workers with credentials each year through 2034, while schools and training programs across the state produce about 80,100. Even counting people moving in, the state would still come up more than 10,000 short each year, about 7,500 of them at the bachelor's level, the report projects.
Former students can find details on the board's AZ Comeback Initiative page at azregents.edu.
Sources
azregents.edu
