The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents weighed ways the UW System could combat state budget cuts while maintaining quality of instruction on all campuses on Thursday.
Mark Nook, UW System interim senior vice president for academic affairs, said for the past two decades, the price of tuition has been higher than the money appropriated by the state. UW campuses around the state are now also being forced to implement new strategies in an attempt to control operating costs and students’ tuition costs.
Nook said the cost of tuition per student is also greater than what the state grants the UW System in funding per student. He added despite the lack of funding, the UW Systems reported a 45 percent growth in the number of degrees awarded since 1980 as well as a 12 percent growth in enrollment.
Officials said the pressure to control tuition costs is hurting some UW System institutions. UW-Milwaukee, for example, has a student to faculty ratio of 3.5-to-100, UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Michael Lovell said. The national average for student to faculty ratio is 7-to-100.
According to a study by the Goldwater Institute, Lovell said UW-Milwaukee was ranked the 12th-lowest in annual spending per student out of 198 research universities surveyed.
He said UW-Milwaukee spends $13,007 annually on each student, while the national average is $41,337.
“The ratios in some other parts of our campus are the ones that are being impacted. For example, in the College of Letters and Science, we currently have an 800-to-1 student to adviser ratio,” Lovell said.
Lovell said while most UW System campuses have tried to use their monetary resources on improving curriculum, other aspects of the universities such as mental health services are lacking.
He also said at UW-Milwaukee, there are 3,500 students to every one mental health adviser on his campus because of this resource reallocation.
“We all need to recognize there’s a price to pay. As we move our resources towards instruction, other parts of supports for our campus are dwindling,” Lovell said.
According to a UW System statement, Regent David Walsh questioned if funding shortages would ever require System schools to cut back on student enrollment.
UW System President Kevin Reilly said others have frequently raised similar concerns and that “it may be sooner than any of us would like.”
Additionally, the Business, Finance and Audit Committee for the Board of Regents voted unanimously in favor of revisions to a Board of Regents policy which governs inter-institutional student governance support organizations.
United Council is the only organization that qualifies under the policy, Dylan Jambrek, United Council of UW students vice president, said. He said the major change is that campuses are no longer required to have a referendum every two years on continuing campus membership in the organization.
Another revision the regents approved is one which requires 10 percent of the student body to sign petitions to trigger a referendum on membership, Jambrek said.
In the Feb. 10 edition of The Badger Herald, it was incorrectly reported that there are 35 students on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus for every one mental health adviser. The article should have said there is one counselor for every 3,593 UW-Milwaukee students. The national standard is one counselor per every 1,000 to 1,500 students. The error occurred in the article “Regents weigh coping with cuts to System.” The Herald regrets the error, and the online version of the story has been changed to reflect the correct information.
