Last week, the Board of Regents voted to freeze admissions at all UW System schools, a move that early estimates indicate could affect thousands of prospective students.
The regents want you to believe their admissions freeze was inevitable following further budget cuts imposed by the Joint Finance Committee that could total more than $20 million.
According to President Jay Smith, “These additional cuts leave us with no other choice but to suspend enrollment.”
Unfortunately, admissions wasn’t the only thing suspended last week–the regents seem to have taken complete leave of their senses as well. If the regents had put any real thought into it, they would have realized an admissions freeze is both unnecessary and counter-productive.
Cutting enrollment is not an effective way to save significant amounts of money. Students cover most of their own education costs through tuition. The few thousand students affected by the freeze will have a barely perceptible affect on the budget; this is especially true since the cuts will be spread evenly through the system’s 26 schools.
An admissions freeze will have serious implications down the road as well, since fewer students will be able to attend school and train for the type of high-tech jobs that are important for Wisconsin’s future.
The regents would have realized this if they had bothered to give any thought to the best interests of students.
However, the regents weren’t thinking about students when they made their decision–they were thinking about the state Legislature.
They gambled that if they went completely overboard and reacted to the freeze in the most drastic, outrageous way possible, the Joint Finance Committee would be forced to back down. To this end, the regents did everything short of marching around the Capitol draped in signs reading, “The end is nigh” to generate hyperbole and hysteria.
The regents barely even bothered to mask the real reason for the freeze.
President Smith virtually spelled out his true intentions when he asked the Board of Regents’ legislative affairs coordinator, Fred Mohs, “to lead a team of regents to carry our message very clearly to friends in the Legislature.”
Judging from this brazen public admission of the true motivation behind the cuts, it doesn’t seem the regents gave any thought to the possibility that they wouldn’t be able to successfully manipulate the Legislature. Certain of victory, they never considered what would happen in the unlikely event that they were actually stuck with the dread admissions freeze.
The regents assumed that, faced with the unsavory prospect of being blamed for enrollment cuts, the Joint Finance Committee would have no choice but to cave in.
Not surprisingly, the Legislature wasn’t amused by the Board of Regents’ blatant attempts to intimidate and bully it. Assembly Republicans called the regents’ actions “blackmail” and responded by proposing millions of dollars of additional cuts for the university. Far from caving in, they decided to cut travel money, need-based travel-abroad grants and UW’s advertising budget.
Before things get even more out of hand, the regents need to stop this game of one-upmanship–after all, they are the ones who started it. Thanks to them, UW now suffers from not only a hastily thrown together and ill-conceived admissions freeze, but from a slew of other cuts as well.
Although both the regents and the Legislature behaved equally childishly and irresponsibly, it is up to the regents to take the initiative in remedying this situation.
It’s the regents, and not the state Legislature, who are responsible for students’ well-being. They need to get rid of their admissions freeze and start working with Legislature instead of against it. If they don’t, it will be students who lose out.
Kristin Wieben ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and French.
