Why Tech Colleges Fought Evers-Vos-LeMahieu Spending Plan

A student takes notes during an introduction to ethics class at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College on Monday, July 28, 2025, in Green Bay, Wis. Northeast Wisconsin Technical College has seen higher retention and graduation rates since condensing most courses from 16 weeks to eight. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)

On Monday, Gov. Tony Evers announced a deal he reached with outgoing Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, that would have spent down a majority of the state’s $2.5 billion budget surplus on a combination of tax cuts and additional funding for schools.

After the state Assembly passed the bill Wednesday, the Senate voted it down.

One provision of the failed package would have shifted nearly $50 million in funding for the state’s technical schools from property tax levies to direct state funding. That would account for around 20 percent of the amount of funding they receive annually from property tax revenue.

The heads of all 16 of Wisconsin’s technical colleges denounced the proposed bill in an open letter Wednesday, writing that it would shift funding “from one pocket to another” without helping the college system and could add reliance on state funding that “is neither predictable nor reliable.”

“There is a clear motivation by some parties to try to get us off the property tax entirely,” Wisconsin Technical College System President Layla Merrifield told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today. “I think severing that tie completely would be a mistake, and so we just didn’t want to walk down that path any further.”

Merrifield explained the system’s pushback to the bill and the demand they’re seeing for workers in nearly every sector of the state’s economy.

The following was edited for clarity and brevity.

Kate Archer Kent: Can you give us some context of what a $50 million dollar shift would do — about a third of the technical college system revenue already comes from state aid. Would this $50 million shift to state aid be that impactful?

Layla Merrifield: You might say, “Well, what’s the difference, as long as you’re still getting the same amount of money?” I would say that, since our funding formula changed about 12 years ago, what we have seen is lack of investment in the technical college system year after year. This is a $1.7 billion system. It serves almost 300,000 Wisconsinites every year. We provide critical services at the local level and we received about a $3 million annual increase in the latest state budget. That is not nearly enough, in terms of our cost, to continue.

We certainly appreciate that our taxpayers have limited means and we have to live within those means. We are in the process of making serious changes to our operations to live within that budget. But we have not found that we compete very well in the state budget process. Our funding stability and the stability of the system really depends on that local partnership continuing.

KAK: You mentioned making serious changes to your operation to live within your budget. What does that look like?

LM: We’re making quite a few changes that are internal. We continue to modernize our operations, automate our own business operations and try to integrate AI to be as efficient as we can possibly be.

But what that looks like around the state, in other cases, are serious layoffs, discontinuing programs and growing wait lists for students. We have students who are waiting — sometimes years — to get into high-demand, high-pay fields. Meanwhile on the other end, our employers are telling us that they need more dental hygienists. They need more CNC machinists. Our fire departments need more firefighters and we are just not able to keep up with that demand on either side. So it’s really becoming a bottleneck for the state’s economy, for public safety and for our employers, who are already dealing with a demographic drought here in Wisconsin. They really can’t afford to have three-year-long wait lists for critical industries and critical careers.

KAK: Enrollment has been rising at the state’s technical colleges, bouncing back since the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is still not up to highs of the mid-2010s. What is affecting your enrollments now?

LM: We have multiple trends happening that are affecting us. Number one, I think affordability in higher education is front-and-center for working families. How am I going to pay for college? What’s an affordable pathway to a family-sustaining career for me? For almost 300,000 students every year, that pathway runs through the technical college.

We are becoming increasingly an alternative place to start your bachelor’s degree and get a few credits at an affordable price. We continue to see demand for just ongoing critical services. We do most of the firefighter training in this state. We train most of the police officers in this state (and) correctional officers in this state. That demand is always there.

We are seeing critical shortages — particularly in our rural areas — for more EMTs. We are attempting to expand that training. We did get a small amount of funding in the last year to expand those cohorts. We could grow our enrollments even more if we had the resources to do so.

Tuition in our system … on average, covers about 20 percent of our costs. We offer quite a few programs that are just high-cost. These are not your sort of stereotypical community colleges; we do a lot of technical training that’s very hands-on: HVAC systems, CNC machines, firefighter training. These are all things that are high-cost to provide. Without additional resources, we cannot open up those waiting lists and bring more of those students in. You would see an even greater increase in our enrollments if we had the resources to do it.

KAK: This echoes an open letter from the heads of Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges. They argued that Wisconsin is facing significant workforce shortages across nearly every sector. You’re talking about years-long waiting lists in some areas. Other than increasing funding, what can the state do to remedy those shortages?

LM: There are always things that you can do to try to become more efficient, but in many cases, those things are out of our hands. If it’s an industry accreditor that sets a certain class size, if it’s a lack of clinical slots for nurses or sonographers. Those are some critical areas where we continue to see growing demand, but without a proctor and a place for that student to go once it’s time for their workplace training, we cannot grow the cohort without the slots on the other end.

Wisconsin tech college system president pushes back on failed bipartisan spending bill was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.