At a meeting with the Board of Regents Thursday, University of Wisconsin officials will be proposing the university’s 27.5 percent out-of-state student cap be lifted for the next four years.
In a blog post, UW Chancellor Rebecca Blank said the motivations for the university seeking this change are due to the decreasing number of Wisconsin high school students in addition to only 15 percent of non-resident students staying in Madison the year following graduation. At its peak in 2009, 71,000 students graduated high school, but that number has been declining, with a projected 2015 count of 64,100.
“In short, the state of Wisconsin needs to retain and attract as many young workers into the state as possible,” Blank said. “As one of the top-ranked schools in the nation, we attract highly skilled young people from around the world to Wisconsin. This is an opportunity for the state to retain these individuals after they graduate.”
Associated Students of Madison Chair Madison Laning said the change wouldn’t affect current students as much, but it will “dramatically” change the composition of the university. Although waiving the cap would be temporary, in four years’ time, there would be a new composition of an entire UW undergraduate body that will include upward of 40 to 50 percent out-of-state students.
In what she described as a “scramble” in response to imposing budget cuts, the only reason this is happening is because the university needs more money. Laning said there should be other avenues that are explored, and that she hopes the Board of Regents looks deeper at this proposal to see the long-term effects it has and how it’ll affect UW in the future.
There’s a push to increase incoming freshman class sizes by the university, but more out-of-state students would create larger class sizes on campus at a time when the university can’t support the number of students they already have, Laning said. Overall, Laning said the university is trying to fix a part of the university that isn’t broken.
But one of the bigger concerns from ASM, Lanning said, is that no shared governance was used in this proposal.
“In the state we’re in right now, in which the chancellor keeps talking about the value of shared governance, it did not occur with this proposal and no students were consulted in whether this would be a good decision or not,” Laning said.
Blank said given today’s demographics, a 27.5 percent cap no longer makes sense, and if the board were to approve the proposal, there wouldn’t be a drastic change to the enrollment profile.
Laning challenged that notion and said it could end up also changing the intellectual diversity on campus, as the university is going to be admitting students who can pay to go here instead of ones that may have the test scores to go here.
“I think UW is a great university, and it’s unique because it serves the students and families of Wisconsin,” Laning said. “But do we truly have the diversity on campus and the commitment to the families of Wisconsin that we have so long prided ourselves on? Will we still have those values if we’re not serving a majority of Wisconsin families?”
