This summer the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved a 5.5 percent tuition increase for all four-year campuses to help alleviate the $250 million budget cut.

The percentage increase in tuition remains the same as the previous two years, according to Regent Jeffrey Bartell, chair of the Capital Planning and Budget Committee. He added he believes UW System schools remain very competitive compared to their peers. Of the Big Ten Schools, UW has the second lowest in-state tuition. In addition to that, other UW System schools are affordable in comparison to others.

“Tuition increases have been relatively modest in recent years, but still allowed the regents the ability to maintain the high quality of the institutions,” Bartell said.

One concern expressed by Bartell as well as by Regent Brent Smith, chair of the Business and Finance Committee, is the shrinking percentage of the UW System budget that comes from state funding.

Smith pointed to the decreasing amount of the UW System’s budget coming from state funding as one of the reasons for the increase in tuition.

“It cannot continue to go at that rate in our view,” Smith said. “Obviously, we still are a state system, and that is where our funds should been coming from and it has been a difficult thing for us.”

Since the fiscal year 2002-03, the money the state has given the UW System began to decrease, and only slightly increased again in the 2006-07 fiscal year, according to the UW System Fact Book.

According to David Schmiedicke, the state budget director for Gov. Jim Doyle, when Doyle came into office in 2003, he inherited a $3.2 billion deficit and had to make various budget cuts, not just to the UW System.

“Regents have been concerned probably for several decades with the trend we’ve seen over the last 40 to 50 years,” Bartell said. “The state percentage of revenue has diminished from around over 50 percent to now around 25 percent.”

He added the large decrease in the amount of the UW System’s budget coming from state funding since he attended UW in the ’60s is not necessarily negative, rather it shows a transition of where funding comes from.

The other main sources for funding include tuition, federal grants and donations.

According to an independent survey by the Council for Aid to Education, the UW Foundation, the official fundraising organization for UW, was ranked eighth in the nation in 2008 for leading schools in fund-raising, receiving a total of $410.23 million.

Schmiedicke also said despite the deficit, the governor has done a lot for higher education, such as increasing financial aid by $37 million and implementing the “hold-harmless” policy, which protects students whose family income is less than $60,000 from tuition increases.

In 2006, the state funding to UW System began to increase again, and throughout the years Doyle worked to ensure tuition increases remained reasonable, added Schmiedicke.

“In times of one of the worst national crisis in years, when many universities are raising tuition by double digits, 5.5 percent is fairly reasonable,” Schmiedicke said.