In 1996, the Arizona Legislature charged our universities, community colleges, and Board of Regents to collaborate to develop ways for students to seamlessly transfer from community colleges to universities. Meeting the higher education needs of our state was and is a priority of these three bodies. The Academic Program Articulation Steering Committee was formed as the cooperative body to carry out this charge. On behalf of the community colleges and Arizona Board of Regents, it prepares an annual report to the legislature on the progress toward improving articulation and transfer.

Volume I: Facts
Analyses of Arizona state government finance, using data of the Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee, and of the combined finances of all state and local governments within Arizona, using data of the U.S. Census Bureau. A historical perspective is provided for both datasets. For combined state and local government finance, comparisons are made to other states and to the national average. In addition, other measures of the tax burden by state are examined.

Volume II: Concepts and Issues
Addresses the conceptual and empirical relationships between taxes, government revenue, and economic growth. Also discusses current issues specific to Arizona state government finance. This is a revised version of the report "Tax Reductions, the Economy, and the Deficit in the Arizona State Government General Fund," incorporating new and updated material.

Volume III: Options for Managing the Arizona State General Fund
Presents options and offers recommendations for managing the Arizona state government general fund. The near-term budget deficit is addressed as well as ways to prevent budget deficits from recurring every time economic growth slows.

In the Arizona University System, research that leads to real innovations translates to technologies and products that improve lives and stimulate the economy. This report provides an in-depth and comprehensive review of Arizona's higher education research enterprise. It is designed to allow the reader to easily locate any single research metric for any of Arizona's three public universities and quickly compare each Arizona university's performance against those of its Board-approved peers.

The TRIF budget provides seed-funding and support for significant research projects at all three universities. The supported research includes projects in bioscience to improve health and projects in sustainability and renewable energy, including water, solar, and forest health. At the UA, TRIF also supports space exploration and optical solutions, while at ASU it supports work with national security systems. TRIF dollars continue to support research critical to the future economic development of the state of Arizona and to a quality educational experience for our students. TRIF supported workforce development projects, especially in Arizona’s high-need areas, including The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix to train more doctors to address the shortage of physicians in Arizona.

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the educational achievement and attainment of Latinos living in Arizona. In short, the educational performance and attainment of Hispanics lags considerably behind that of the state’s non-Hispanic white residents. Moreover, the growth in the number of Hispanics, especially children, has far outpaced that of the non-Hispanic white population, raising the importance of this educational gap. This issue was highlighted in the 2001 Morrison Institute report Five Shoes Waiting to Drop on Arizona’s Future.

The specific goal of this report is to assess the future of Hispanic educational performance and attainment in Arizona, but this outlook is dependent to a very sizable extent on the characteristics of the Hispanics living in Arizona. In particular, the educational achievement and attainment of Hispanic immigrants has been substantially less than that of Hispanics born in the United States. Forecasting Hispanic immigration specifically and the characteristics of the Hispanic population generally is extremely difficult for two reasons: severe data limitations, and recent legal and policy changes related to immigration.

The Arizona Board of Regents presents in this 2020 Vision a framework for the Arizona University System to improve the economic strength of our state and quality of life for Arizonans over the next 12 years. This plan lays out a series of touchstones for this ambition organized around four key themes: Educational Excellence, Research Excellence, Community Engagement and Workforce Impact, and Productivity. This plan builds on a foundation manifested in previous strategic planning efforts of the universities and the Board, including the establishment of a medical college in Phoenix, development of new health professions programs not offered by public institutions in the state, growth in the research enterprise, and increasingly intensive efforts to provide baccalaureate access to all regions of the state.

In the 2009 report entitled "Vision 2020," the Arizona Board of Regents outlined the objective of raising Arizona to the national average of college graduates in the work force and moving Arizona to the status of a large scale center for academic research. This realignment plan outlines how both of these significant goals will be achieved in an era of more modest public investment.

The purpose of the stabilization fund is to reduce the fluctuations in general fund revenue caused by the economic cycle. These fluctuations result in large budget surpluses in some years and large deficits in other years. Without considering the structural deficit, the budget stabilization fund almost certainly will not have the funding necessary to offset the cyclical reduction in revenue that will occur during the next recession.