During the past year, University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly has led the UW System in the face of $300 million in funding and budgetary lapses. The Badger Herald sat down with Reilly to discuss the impact of these trends and possible solutions being offered. Here are the highlights in part one of a two part series.

The Badger Herald: Do you see these cuts as a long-term trend? And where do you think the UW System should turn to for funding?

Kevin Reilly: It is a long-term trend. The defunding of higher education, relatively speaking, in state budgets has been going on for a number of years across the country. It’s not just here. … There have been blips, but the long-term trend has been down.

We need to diversify our revenues, which we have started to do. We certainly are getting a lot more private dollars come in through fundraising and development activities to help support more and more of our core education work.

Tuition has, unfortunately in my opinion, become a much bigger share of how we fund education for undergraduates. The trouble with that is if we keep pushing tuition up, we’re going to go against the access and affordability goals that we have. We need, in Wisconsin especially, more students to be able to get into and through some university experience.

We’re behind the national average in terms of the percentage of people with a baccalaureate degree in the state. So part of our argument to the state is to say we don’t want to continue driving tuition up because the state money is going down because that is going against where we need to go as a state.

BH: Recently, you raised the possibility of an enrollment cap. Why would it be needed, and do you think that it will be implemented in the future?

KR: We’re concerned about quality. There is some relationship between the funding we have and the quality of the education we can provide. … So, we certainly hope we don’t have to go there. Again, that would be, in my opinion, shooting ourselves in the foot because we need more college graduates.

On the other hand, nobody wants to see a situation where we’re producing more college graduates but they’re being poorly educated at UW. We certainly don’t want to go there. The quality of what we have to offer to our students has to be paramount.

BH: At the February Board of Regents meeting, Regent David Walsh raised the possibility of cutting enrollment. Is this being considered as a viable option?

KR: I think people have raised it and continue off and on as they see the kinds of cuts that the university has to absorb because regents, as the stewards for the university system, are very concerned about the quality themselves. So I think we’ll hear that come up again.

We certainly don’t want to go there, but I think to be good stewards we have to raise the possibility that if we have less resources to work with, at some point we are going to have to have less students.

Do we want to do that? No. Would that be exactly the wrong thing to do for Wisconsin? Yes. But I think the people of Wisconsin and their elected officials have to say, “Okay. We understand that. Enough is enough and we have to help them get down.”

BH: Would you support a tuition cap?

KR: We have had for the last four years, we have kept tuition to 5.5 percent, which I would argue is a modest and, certainly predicable the way we’ve done it. We haven’t had huge jumps and flops back and forth in the way we handled tuition, so we want people to be able to plan.

Looking forward, I think it would be a mistake to cap tuition unless the Legislature said, “OK, we’ll give this amount of [General Purpose Revenue] reinvestment if you’ll cap tuition.” I’d love to have that conversation.

BH: Do you think the UW System should change the ratios on out-of-state and in-state students?

KR: I think we ought to have that discussion. My position is that when you look at, if you take UW-Madison out of the mix, the last time I looked at this across all of the other institutions in the UW System we had something like around 8 percent out-of-state students not counting the Minnesota students who come in under reciprocity.

So I said to the Legislature and the governor that is really too few for all the rest of the system. Why is it too few? Well, number one, educationally it’s too few. We want our kids in Wisconsin, who are the Wisconsin residents going to our institutions, to rub shoulders with more people from outside the boundaries of Wisconsin because, guess what? They’re going to have to make a living with a lot of those people when they graduate from here.

So that’s part of the educational and job preparation process. The other good thing that out-of-state students bring is more cash. Out-of-state students pay about three times what an in-state student does, and that extra money enables us to provide more seats for in-state students.

So the position we’ve taken is we ought to look at that as long as we’re not displacing in-state students. And Madison is the special case there where there is a regent policy that Madison is capped at no more than 25 percent out-of-state students.

On the other hand, if we can work to say we are going to increase the number of seats for in-state students in Madison, if you allow us to have additional out-of-state students whose higher tuition would allow us to create more seats in Madison, well then that’s a discussion worth having because in both of those instances, then you get the ability to create more seats for Wisconsin residents by having more out-of-state students here and you get the extra benefit of that cross-fertilization between our in-state students and people from around the county and around the world.