The state Assembly will meet Monday to weigh a bill that aims to give several University of Wisconsin System schools the ability to create and add differential tuition to the schools’ budgets.

Differential tuition is additional tuition that is separate from base tuition level and serves to supplement student services and programs for the UW System. According to the Legislative Reference Bureau, certain schools such as UW-Stevens Point or UW-Green Bay do not have differential tuition under current law.

The bureau said this bill would allow UW System schools that do not have differential tuition to work with school board members to add it based on funding for student services and programs.

UW already has differential tuition, and this bill would not pose any significant changes under the current budget period.

The bill has received bipartisan support, with both Democrats and Republicans helping author the bill. Rep. Joan Ballweg, R-Marksen, co-authored the bill. She said she created the bill because she thought it would be fairer for institutions that currently do not have differential tuition to be able to decide if they wanted to add it to their budgets.

According to Ballweg, the four entities that do not have differential tuition are UW-Stevens Point, UW-Green Bay, UW-Parkside and UW Colleges, the body of 14 two-year colleges in the UW System. She said the bill allows the university to work with student governments to bring the differential tuition proposal to the Board of Regents for approval.

“I tried to get this as an addition to the budget, but there wasn’t enough time to work it out. I thought it would be best to do a bill that would allow them to go through the same process as any other institution,” Ballweg said. “In that way, it would provide the groundwork for any other institution that would want to pursue it.”

While the bill has received bipartisan support, there is still opposition to it in the Assembly. Mike Mikalsen, spokesperson for Rep. Stephen Nass, R-Whitewater, said Nass is opposed to the bill. Nass is currently the head of the Committee on College and Universities.

Mikalsen said Nass fought for a tuition cap in the state budget for students in July and denied raises for any new differential tuition after July 1 of this year.

“At the current point in time, the level of student debt has escalated to such a degree that Wisconsin is the fifteenth highest in the country in terms of students who graduated in 2010,” Mikalsen said. “Rep. Nass is not going to support continuing to jack up the tuition on those students to finance the UW System that fails to deal with its costs.”

He also said he thought the bill had received bipartisan support in the Assembly because the Republicans that support this bill are close to the campuses that would be able to create and raise differential tuition.