BOULDER, CO (December 4, 2025) — A recent report from the Common Sense Institute (CSI) addresses two important policy questions about Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program: 1) how much the ESA program will cost in the upcoming year, and 2) what the demographic characteristics of ESA users are by household income and race/ethnicity.

David Garcia of Arizona State University reviewed ESA’s in Arizona: Q3 2025 Report. He determined that, given the limited data available about the program’s volatility, policymakers should not be lulled into thinking that the major financial hits to the state’s budget are in the past.

This view runs contrary to the report’s conclusion that the ESA program is now “essentially fully subscribed,” meaning the rapid, runaway growth in students and costs observed over the past two years is not expected to continue. The report further reasons that, at this point in the policy’s implementation, ESA costs are largely offset by declines in public school enrollment. Again, Prof. Garcia explains that the situation is too volatile to reliably make such predictions.

On student demographics, the report finds that the typical ESA student comes from a middle-income Arizona household and that ESA users generally resemble the state’s overall K-12 population by race and ethnicity. Yet the report’s own analysis shows that ESA students are considerably more white than Arizona’s public-school students, complicating the narrative that the program fully reflects the state’s diversity.

This new report follows three earlier quarterly CSI analyses released over the past year, each addressing essentially the same questions about cost and user characteristics. While the Q3 report does not break new ground relative to the prior versions, the frequency of these reports underscores both the urgency surrounding Arizona’s ESA program and the ongoing uneasiness about its future fiscal impact. Prof. Garcia concludes that, despite its efforts to suggest that the dust has settled following the universal expansion and subsequent runaway growth of the program, the report is ultimately constrained by limited data, and policymakers should not assume that Arizona has weathered all the significant budget impacts.

Find the review, by David R. Garcia, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/az-esas

Find ESA’s in Arizona: Q3 2025 Report, written by Glenn Farley and published by Common Sense Institute Arizona, at:
https://www.commonsenseinstituteus.org/arizona/research/education/esas-in-arizona-q3-2025-report