Morning. In today’s newsletter: Arizona university reputations and Sinema’s (apparently DOA) border deal.
A couple of decades ago, Arizona State University was the punch line in TV shows.
Hollywood writers considered it the party school, the dead-end diploma, the place you went when you couldn’t get in anywhere else.
But you don’t hear those jokes much anymore, particularly now that ASU regularly beats out academic powerhouses like Stanford and MIT for the nation’s most innovative school award.
ASU now enrolls more than 60,000 in online education , among other success stories. And University of Arizona — historically considered the state’s top-shelf research institution — is clearly feeling pressure to keep up.
As columnist Abe Kwok points out, UA made a sketchy call to acquire a financially troubled online university and allowed overspending by nearly every academic unit on campus.
And now it must make painful layoffs, defer projects and suspend guaranteed tuition — not exactly the things you’d put in recruitment letters to promising new students or innovative faculty.