With funding for the University of Wisconsin System still in question and budget negotiations continuing at the Capitol, four experts in postsecondary education discussed state funding for colleges and universities at an open forum Thursday. The event, sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, covered topics ranging from analysis of the Wisconsin Covenant to factors influencing state funding of postsecondary education, to rewards the government reaps from funding higher education. Participants in the forum included UW System administrators, UW faculty and administrators, students, legislative aides and members of the state fiscal bureau, according to WISCAPE Managing Director Noel Radomski. "The goal here is to improve public policy, to shine light on those beliefs that are informing policy decisions downtown and also in Bascom Hall and … Van Hise, so ultimately our aim is to make policy better based on research," Radomski said. He added the forum sought to translate the complex research on educational trends to a form more accessible to policymakers. David Weerts, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, presented his research on a multitude of factors — rational, political and cultural — that affect state funding for postsecondary education. One of the cultural factors, he said, is the tradition of education funding in each particular state and the tendency — what Weerts called "enactment theory" — for that monetary level to remain constant. "Decisions are driven by assumptions of how things should be … if the state has historically cared a lot about higher education, like [Wisconsin], you could argue from progressive era, that there's sort of a continuance of this culture," Weerts said. "We might be losing support or whatever over a period of time, but we were never Mississippi." Weerts also separated the factors affecting state funding between those controlled by the state and efforts made by the institution itself. "The question is, do these state-level variables really kind of trump the institution-level variables?" Weerts said. Edward St. John, a University of Michigan researcher discussed lessons to be learned from comparing the Wisconsin Covenant — a middle- and high-school college funding program — to similar ones like Indiana's Twenty-First Century Scholars Program and the North Carolina Covenant. "The difference in state context is critical, and that is where the battle is in Wisconsin," St. John said. He also explored the trends in state need-based aid and college enrollment rates through the 1980s and ’90s, arguing there is a link between high need-based aid and high enrollment rates. He argued that while Pell Grants and other funding provide good aid support for middle-income students, there is a serious lack of aid for low-income students. "The fact is, the failure to evaluate is part of why we had this period of great inequality. We have to bring evaluation into effective practice and policy," St. John said. St. John also said ideas behind the Wisconsin Covenant could prove difficult to fulfill, adding more students are graduating from high school, but fewer are going to college. "It's really important, if you give a guarantee to fulfill it," St. John said. "Because we already know we're educating more kids in high school and we're leaving more kids behind, and that's creating false promise." Debbie Durcan, UW System vice president for finance, was an attendee of the meeting and said both UW and UW System officials who attended the forum would study the information presented for further use in policy. "I thought it was very interesting, and had me more interested to learn the detailed … factors that they considered, and what that means for Wisconsin," Durcan said.