GOP Cuts to UW System Hurt Wisconsin Students
Board of Regents approves UW-Madison request to lift nonresident cap
MADISON – On Thursday, the UW System Board of Regents approved a request by UW-Madison to waive their nonresident enrollment limit. In their request for this waiver, UW-Madison noted that “recent budget reductions were distributed across education and administrative units, resulting in some reduced services to students and more limited class offerings.”
Rep. Dana Wachs (D-Eau Claire) – ranking Democratic member of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities – issued the following statement after the decision by the Board of Regents:
“Once again, we have demonstrative evidence of the damage done to our universities by the reckless budget cuts of Governor Walker and the Legislative Republicans. Our flagship university, UW-Madison, has requested that the cap on out of state students be lifted in order to help mitigate the damage caused by Governor Walker’s unprecedented cuts. Lifting this cap could make it much more difficult for Wisconsin residents to get into UW-Madison, and it also has the potential of creating larger class sizes and greater reductions in services for students. Other UW System schools have already made extremely difficult cuts to programs, services, classes, and personnel.
“We should recognize the importance of the UW System to our state’s economic future and give it the tools to provide great opportunities to Wisconsin students, instead of forcing these universities to continue to make difficult and often devastating decisions that affect the quality of education that they provide to our own residents. We must work together to reverse these massive cuts to our UW System.”
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. It has not been verified for its accuracy or completeness.
Mentioned in This Press Release
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Time for UW to dip into that huge slush fund
Paul, the UW system’s poor decisions on financial reporting policies aside… most of that cash on hand is not usable in the way you’re saying. Most of it is ear marked for special purposes and much of it is not from tax payer sources. Besides, wouldn’t we rather have a system with cash on hand instead of growing debts?
That being said… I can’t believe they’d go this route instead of taking real steps to find system wide efficiencies and reorganizing around those opportunities. There’s no reason there shouldn’t be central HR, operations, purchasing, and other departments not to mention other efficiencies in aligning academic programs other resources. We don’t need so many over lapping programs for example.
What overlapping programs?
While the UW system is a system, the schools are all separate institutions, they are not satellite campuses of each other. That is an important fact that I think many folks get confused about when discussing UW finances.
It would be unwise to get into a situation where certain majors are only offered at specific schools.
Nicholas, that’s exactly what the conversation should be about. Why shouldn’t the system operate more interdependently?
Also, some majors it wouldn’t make sense to limit to just specific schools, but other times it does. Especially the smaller majors with a smaller student base and/or where you can pool resources, etc.