Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 27

were long-standing inequitable gaps in how the school assessed
students for admission. They learned that approximately
50,000 high school students, many of them students
of color, attended schools where they were only required to
take 14 core courses to graduate. By comparison, NAU and
the other four-year public institutions in Arizona had long required
16 core courses and a 3.0 GPA.
" That was not equitable, and that was policy, " Olsen
told me. Those admissions standards were set by the Arizona
Board of Regents, which meant that statewide policy had
to change. Administrators at NAU worked with Arizona State
University and the University of Arizona, and in February
2022 persuaded the board to reduce the requirement from 16
core courses to 14. Now, any Arizona high school student is offered
admission to NAU if they have a 2.75 or higher core GPA
(based on a 4.0 scale and calculated using only the 14 required
core courses).
One of the officials Cruz Rivera had to lobby to change
the statewide rules was Lyndel Manson, a former chair of
the Arizona Board of Regents. Manson, who was appointed
by former Republican Governor Doug Ducey, heralded NAU's
decision as a bold intervention. " I think we have pigeonholed
ourselves in this state in terms of who goes to college, and I
think we have missed an opportunity to serve more broadly, "
Manson said when the new admissions criteria were announced.
" I think [this is] going to be truly important moving
forward to meet the broader needs of the state. "
It is one thing to open admissions to students who had
previously been shut out, quite another for those students to
afford to attend. To make the latter possible, Cruz Rivera successfully
lobbied for extra state funding, and last fall, the university
began offering free tuition for every Arizona resident
from a family with a household income of $65,000 or below.
Approximately 50 percent of Arizona households currently
meet this financial threshold.
When admitted students apply for financial aid, they're
often confused by the bureaucratic language involved, especially
if they're the first in their families to attend college. So
the university removed jargony terms like " Pell eligible " and
instead stated plainly what the family income threshold for
tuition assistance is. No longer does the university leave students
second-guessing if they can even afford an education in
the first place.
These changes weren't just serving NAU's goals; they also
were meeting the state's workforce needs. In Arizona's booming
economy, nearly seven out of 10 jobs require some kind of
education or training after high school, whether a certificate,
license, or college degree. Meanwhile, as Cruz Rivera noted to
me, the state ranks poorly in educational attainment and the
percentage of adults with a college degree.
One way to boost those numbers, the NAU team knew,
was to lure back to campus former students who had accumulated
credits but had left without earning a degree. Thanks
to support from the Lumina Foundation, the university in
July 2022 launched Jacks on Track-a program to attract students
back to NAU who dropped out sometime in the 2020-21
academic year. (Jacks is a reference to the Lumberjack, NAU's
mascot.) Although the number of returning NAU students
remains small-about 11 percent-it is still much higher than
the national return rate of about 2 percent.
" When students are debating whether to come back and
complete, they're thinking, 'How am I going to fit this into
my life?' " Olsen told me, adding that the outreach strategy
has been to focus on students who have already earned 90 or
more credits and are close to reaching the 120 needed to complete
the degree.
Another way for NAU to meet the workforce needs of
the state is to ensure that its curricula are aligned to the job
requirements that graduates will need for the future. To that
end, Cruz Rivera created the Office of Workforce Development,
which works directly with businesses like the Phoenix
Suns and Kind Hospitality, a restaurant management company,
to make sure that students have the skills needed for
work and jobs waiting for them after college. Earlier this year,
NAU's School of Hotel and Restaurant Management opened a
workforce development center in partnership with Kind Hospitality
near the Phoenix-Mesa airport, where undergraduate
business students can train in the hospitality industry and enter
a pipeline to jobs in the Phoenix area.
It is one thing to open
admissions to students
who had previously been
shut out, quite another
for those students to
afford to attend. To make
the latter possible, Cruz
Rivera successfully lobbied
for extra state funding.
With programs like these, Cruz Rivera is leaning into
one of the inherent strengths of institutions like NAU. Unlike
elite flagships, which attract many students from out of
state who then scatter across the country and the world after
graduation, regional universities like NAU overwhelmingly
educate in-state students who go on to build their careers
in the state. This means that the money state governments
spend on regional universities has, according to recent studies,
a better rate of return for taxpayers than dollars spent
on flagship universities. (See Zach Marcus, " Those Colleges
With 'State' in Their Names, " page 18.)
Cruz Rivera's constant efforts to train low- and middle-income
students for jobs in the local workforce have also
Washington Monthly 27
Washington Monthly - September/October 2024

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