When Gov. Jim Doyle delivers his budget this Friday, the UW community has been forewarned: Don’t expect “a valentine” sent down from the statehouse.
It appears one of Gov. Doyle’s bevy of campaign promises has already fallen by the wayside. During a blood-and-guts campaign to unseat incumbent Republican Scott McCallum, Doyle pledged that his plan to bridge Wisconsin’s multi-billion-dollar budget gap would not hit UW System students with anything greater than a 10 percent tuition increase. But judging by statements presented by both Doyle and UW System president Katharine Lyall during last week’s Board of Regents meeting, such a figure will now land outside the realms of both fiscal and political possibility.
Lyall has proposed a tuition increase as large as 25 percent over time to help ease the budget burden. Most regents fell in line with Lyall’s proposal, in which the increase would be installed several years. Currently, UW-Madison charges $4,423 per year for undergraduate resident tuition, sharing the basement of the Big 10 with Iowa. A 25 percent increase in in-state tuition would raise the figure to $5,509 — the fifth highest in the conference.
Such an increase may seem a drastic blow to students’ pocketbooks. Yet, so long as out-of-state tuition does not shoot up at a similar rate, tuition is the most reasonable outlet for financing these cuts. The proposal would shift UW to the middle of the road in cost in an effort to keep it near the top in quality. Sounds to us like a fair trade.
At the end of the day, we are pleased to see state policy makers err on the side of a more substantial resident tuition increase rather than a slipping in the quality of our educations — while neither are ideal options, as the governor has said, these are not ideal circumstances.
Lyall has said that cuts in enrollment to be a last resort for making ends meet, and rightly so. Restricting access does little in the long run to boost efficiency. While duplication of programming at various UW campuses will also come under fire in the governor’s budget, we implore the administration and the regents to see UW-Madison’s programming for what it is — a cut above the rest. UW-Madison is the UW System’s flagship institution and should be treated as such. Simply because two majors are given the same title in this catalog and Oshkosh’s does not mean the resultant degree carries equal weight.
As 85 percent of the System budget is allocated towards salaries and other personnel expenses, cuts will undoubtedly affect the employment rolls of the UW System, thereby affecting the speed of its bureaucratic services. Yet, faced with the choice of higher turnover times for DARS reports and less qualified professors; we’ll wait for the grades.
The section of non-tenured staff which must be protected above all else are those providing advising services. The current lack of quality advising has been a problem at UW for years, and any steps in the wrong direction would have residual affects on the quality of a UW education — the one hallmark that should be protected above all else.
