Citizen Staff Writer
RENÉE SCHAFER HORTON
rshorton@tucsoncitizen.com
The clock is ticking for nearly 200 students enrolled in an Arizona State University satellite program in Tucson.
Fifty-three undergraduates and 138 graduate students in the Tucson-branch of ASU’s School of Social Work have until December to finish their degrees or will have to finish them in Phoenix.
The change is part of a massive restructuring by ASU President Michael Crow in response to state budget reductions of $88 million to ASU’s base state budget since last June, said Virgil Renzulli, vice president of public affairs.
“We’re at the point where we have to retrench,” Renzulli said, adding that ASU’s lease of the building where the Tucson program is housed runs out in December. It is at 340 N. Commerce Park Loop.
The Tucson component of ASU’s nationally ranked social work program was launched in 1978, according to ASU’s Web site. It is the only program in southern Arizona that offers graduate degrees in social work.
Robert Chapman, 42, is in his second semester as a graduate student in the program. Sixty credit hours are required to attain a masters of social work, but because the program has a 16-hour-per-week field component, there is little chance he’ll be able to finish before December, he said.
“This program is the reason I moved to Tucson,” said Chapman, who moved from New Mexico. “The work load is so heavy and the time demand so great with internships, that most of us need two full calendar years to get through.”
Driving to Phoenix would be a “huge inconvenience and expense,” he said, and would also take him away from the internship he’s completing with the Pascua Yaqui tribe.
“This would be an enormous loss for southern Arizona, when the need for social workers is increasing,” Chapman said.
Arizona State University to close satellite social work program here