What You'll Actually Pay
Price after grants
$13,353 to $22,307 a year for in-state students, depending on income.
College Scorecard 2024 estimate · in-state rates
See the price at your income ↑Sticker price
Full cost before aid: $29,423 a year in-state. Average need-based aid package: $18,363.Aid and debt
43.3%
receive need-based grants
$25,207
average debt at graduation
13,273
students got merit aid
about 31% of undergraduates
$12,930
average merit award
Getting In
Key dates
Test scores
SAT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 1090–1320 · 12% of the class submitted
ACT, middle 50% of those who submitted: 20–28 · 23% of the class submitted
33% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What they value
- Very important
- Course rigor (AP/IB)
- GPA
- Important
- Extracurriculars
- Special talent
- Character
- Demonstrated interest
- Considered
- Class rank
- SAT/ACT scores
- Personal essay
- Volunteer work
- Work experience
- Not considered
- Recommendations
- First-gen status
- Legacy status
- Where you're from
- In-state residency
What this means for you
Arizona rates course rigor as Very Important, and your activities and demonstrated interest as Important.
MoreLess
Rigor means AP, IB, and dual enrollment carry real weight — make sure your mix of AP or IB courses is strong. Depth and leadership in a few activities matter more than a long list. And showing genuine engagement with this school may help your application.
Arizona rates demonstrated interest 'Important' — real weight in the decision.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section C7 (admissions factors)
Arizona just showed you what it values in an application. Use that to write a Why-Arizona essay that's actually about you — not a template.
Get sourced starting points for your essayStudent Life
30.9% of Arizona classes have fewer than 20 students.
30.9%
under 20 students
52.5%
20 to 49
16.6%
50 or more
Every class section counts, labs and seminars included; first-year courses tend to be larger. Arizona CDS 2025–26, I-3.
19:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus life
33.1%
first-years from out of state
18%
live on campus
13%
of men in fraternities
21%
of women in sororities
On-campus housing from University of Arizona Housing & Residential Life (2025) — not reported in Arizona's 2025–26 Common Data Set.
Who attends
- White43.1%
- Hispanic27.8%
- Unknown / other9.3%
- Multiracial5.2%
- Asian4.6%
- Black4.6%
Enrolled undergraduates; international students are counted separately and not included. Arizona CDS 2025–26, B2.
Popular majors
Will They Graduate?
56.5% of Arizona students graduate in 4 years.
56.5%
finish in 4 years
Entered fall 2019
70.9%
finish in 6 years
Entered fall 2019
83%
return after first year
Finishing late means paying for extra semesters, so the 4-year rate is the one that shows the cost.
Students with Pell Grants
65.5% finish in 6 years, against 70.9% of all students.
A 5.4-point gap: Pell Grant students finish less often than students overall.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Tucson.
Tucson is a mid-size Sonoran Desert city ringed by mountains, with the university sitting a mile from downtown and the Fourth Avenue strip in between.
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It is markedly cheaper and slower than Phoenix, more Mexican in its food and architecture than anywhere else in the state, and the first UNESCO City of Gastronomy in the United States — a designation that reflects 4,000 years of continuous agriculture in the valley rather than a restaurant scene. The weather is the real trade-off: winters are the reason people move here, and June routinely runs past 105°F before the summer monsoon breaks it. Students without a car manage, but most of the desert is out of reach without one.
The City
Mid-size city
Tucson, AZ
Best For
Notable alumni
Notable Alumni
Steve Kerr
Won five NBA championships as a player and four more coaching the Golden State Warriors. He played four years of basketball here and took an interdisciplinary studies degree in 1988.
Class of 1988
Savannah Guthrie
Co-anchor of NBC's Today and a former White House correspondent and legal analyst. She graduated cum laude from the journalism school here in 1993, then took a law degree and passed the bar before returning to television.
Class of 1993
Barbara Kingsolver
Novelist and Pulitzer winner for Demon Copperhead, and author of The Poisonwood Bible. She came here for a master's in ecology and evolutionary biology in 1981 and stayed in Tucson to write.
Class of 1981
Jerry Bruckheimer
Producer of Top Gun, Pirates of the Caribbean, Remember the Titans and the CSI series. He took a psychology degree here in 1965 before going into advertising and then film.
Class of 1965
Morris K. Udall
Represented southern Arizona in Congress for thirty years and wrote much of the country's public-lands and strip-mining law. He captained the basketball team here and earned his law degree in 1949.
Class of 1949
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
Traditions
Traditions
Bear Down
The university's rallying cry since 1926, taken from the last message of student athlete John 'Button' Salmon after a car crash. It is painted on the gym, shouted at games, and used unironically by people who have never attended a football match.
Homecoming bonfire and the lighting of 'A' Mountain
The Friday-night bonfire dates to the 1920s and returned in 2011 alongside the lighting of the whitewashed 'A' on Sentinel Peak, which students first built in 1916. Homecoming week ends with a parade older than a century.
Bear Down Music Festival
The student-run replacement for Spring Fling, the campus carnival that ran from 1974 to 2019 and was for a while the largest student-run carnival in the country. The first festival was held in April 2024.
Zona Zoo at McKale Center
The student section for basketball, which is the sport this campus organises itself around — McKale sells out for it in a way the football stadium does not always match.
Weekend escapes from Tucson
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Tucson
Mount Lemmon
About 1 hourThe Catalina Highway climbs 6,000 feet from saguaro to pine, ending at the southernmost ski area in the United States. It is the standard escape from a 105°F afternoon.
Saguaro National Park
20 to 40 minutesTwo districts, one on each side of the city, protecting the densest saguaro forests anywhere. Close enough to be a morning rather than a trip.
Phoenix
About 1 hour 45 minutesThe nearest big-city job market, concert circuit and professional sport, and the airport that gets you overseas.
Bisbee and Tombstone
About 1.5 hoursA former copper-mining town turned artists' colony in the Mule Mountains, next door to the most theatrical of the old West towns. The Mexican border at Nogales is about the same distance south.
Getting there and game days
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Tucson International (TUS)
About 20 minutes from campus
For international flights: Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX) — about 1 hour 45 minutes.
Pro sports nearby
- Arizona Cardinals NFL
- Phoenix Suns NBA
- Arizona Diamondbacks MLB
Internships and jobs nearby
Career Proximity
Tucson's economy runs on defense, optics and health care rather than on finance or tech, and the university is inside all three — Raytheon's missile business is the region's largest private employer with about 13,000 workers, and the mirrors for the world's largest telescopes are cast on campus under the football stadium.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Raytheon (RTX) Missiles & Defense
- Banner – University Medical Center Tucson
- Caterpillar Surface Mining & Technology
- Texas Instruments Tucson
- University of Arizona Tech Park
Phoenix — about 1 hour 45 minutes by car
Who thrives here
Who Thrives Here
Arizona admits 83.5% of applicants, so getting in is rarely the hard part; what a family pays is. In-state tuition and fees run $13,906 against $43,068 from out of state, and 33.1% of the entering class pays the higher number. Aid meets 62.7% of need — well short of covering it — and graduates who borrow leave owing $25,207, which makes this a school to run the arithmetic on before the deposit rather than after. 83% of first-years come back, 70.9% finish within six years and 56.5% in four. Classes are genuinely large: 30.9% of sections hold fewer than 20 students, with 19 students per faculty member, so this rewards someone who will walk into office hours rather than wait to be noticed. Campus life mostly happens off campus — 18% of undergraduates live in university housing, 13% of men and 21% of women join Greek life — and at 27.8% Hispanic undergraduates this is a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, which changes who is in the room. The research is the real draw: the mirrors for the world's largest telescopes are cast under the football stadium, and the university's planetary scientists run NASA missions.