The UW System Board of Regents voted Friday to suspend undergraduate admission at UW campuses, citing the burden of recent budget cuts by Gov. Scott McCallum and the Joint Finance Committee.
Despite the freeze on admission at the 26 UW schools, undergraduates already accepted for Fall 2002 will not be affected. Students not already notified will have their applications suspended until further notice. Admissions began suspending applications Saturday.
UW-Madison is expected to be affected less than other UW System schools because the admissions process for the fall is nearly complete.
Tommie Jones, Board of Regents student representative, said the freeze is necessary to preserve the excellence of UW System schools.
“We don’t want students to feel we are limiting access to the system,” Jones said. “But, this is a decision we had to make in order to preserve quality programs for students. I encourage students to keep the UW Systems in mind and know we will do anything we can do to keep them in the system.”
The system also lost an additional $20 million in funding on top of the existing $51 million in cuts. State lawmakers voted Saturday to make additional cuts to UW Systems. The move to suspend undergraduate admission followed last week’s decision by the Joint Finance Committee to cap tuition at 8 percent and reduce the university’s budget.
The admissions freeze is putting high school seniors who are not accepted to UW System schools — and even those still considering higher-education options — on edge. Sara Feustel-Weigel, a senior at Waukesha Catholic Memorial High School, applied to UW-Madison, Milwaukee, Whitewater and Eau Claire, but has not heard back from any of them.
“I just wanted to go and get an education so I could get some sort of a good job,” she told an AP reporter over the weekend. “They should stop fooling around. There are people who need to know what’s going on, and there are young people who need to decide where their lives are going, and they don’t have forever to decide that.”
At a board meeting Thursday, Board of Regents president Jay Smith said a 10 percent tuition cap is proposed under McCallum’s state budget deficit plan.
The proposed 8 percent tuition cap means a possible $10 million loss.
“To each student, the difference between an 8 percent and a 10 percent increase is about $30 a semester; to the UW System the difference represents a potential $10 million in lost revenue or support for 2,000 students,” Smith said.
The Joint Finance Committee will also cut $10.3 million from the System’s base budget.
“These cuts also put at risk some $58 million in matching money that private sources and companies have put to fund our economic stimulus package,” Smith said.
Under McCallum’s plan, cuts to UW would account for almost 50 percent of the total cut to state agencies, even though the UW System only accounts for 37.5 percent of state operations, Smith said.
Smith said UW Systems cannot absorb cuts in funding from both the governor’s plan and the Finance Committee without reducing undergraduate enrollment. Smith said UW would be forced to reduce admissions by 2,000 students for every $10 million cut.
Smith said Friday he hopes the admissions freeze would be lifted soon.
“We realize the impact this has on the lives of our applicants and their families, and we apologize for the inconvenience,” Smith said. “But, we have no other choice.”
Jones said changes are possible, because the Board needs time to study the budget to completely understand its impact.
“We don’t know when this will happen,” Jones said. “This is going on every hour of every day, and we will keep students posted.”
