Students at Wisconsin universities and colleges may be able to get their undergraduate degrees after only three years, if a report released Friday by a partnership of statewide organizations gains support.
The report, titled “Blueprint for Change 2010,” was released by a nonprofit, nonpartisan group, The Wisconsin Way, and details various recommendations and suggestions in the fields of economic development, tax reform and government spending.
Mark O’Connell, executive director of the Wisconsin Counties Association, said Wisconsin Way decided to compile the report because it saw many jobs and young people leaving the state. Wisconsin personal incomes are below the national average, and the state is also dealing with an increasing aging population.
“What we saw happening, now three years ago, was that our state was not in a position for success and … the kind of trends we saw developing would put us in a bad spot for a time to come,” O’Connell said.
According to O’Connell, there are 2.8 million people currently working in the state, 400,000 of whom are in the public sector and 2.4 million are in the private sector. Much of its report focuses on initiatives to help foster business growth, because when the private sector does well, it helps the entire state.
One of the main initiatives the report recommends is the restructuring and stabilization of funding for the University of Wisconsin System, including revising the four-year curriculum to allow students to achieve a bachelor’s degree in three years.
The report also recommends changes in how students would repay their educational costs. According to O’Connell, the UW System spends approximately $86,000 per student to get a four year education, and students pay for roughly $30,000 of that.
Wisconsin Way recommends annual tuition be set at 25 percent of the per-student cost of educational operations and an income-sensitive tuition program be implemented.
Under this program, students could repay their educational costs over 25 years at a rate which would not go over 5 percent of their income. A student would not have to repay anything in years they make under $25,000, and after 25 years, all costs would be forgiven.
“What it ends up doing, is that it costs students less money for a three year baccalaureate degree than for a four-year degree subsidized by the state,” O’Connell said.
O’Connell added that with students in the workforce sooner, they will start making money to repay their degrees faster, as well as helping the economy.
The report gives a 10 year window for the recommendations to be affected, which O’Connell admitted is a bit of an arbitrary number, as certain changes could be implemented in a couple years, while others will take longer. The main idea behind the report however, is that change does need to happen.
“Our current course that we’re on as a state is not sustainable. We absolutely have to change,” O’Connell said. “This is just one set of ideas. If people have better ideas, that’s great, then tell us what they are … but if all people want to do is criticize, we really don’t have time for that.”
