Wisconsinites are increasingly looking for better returns on their tax-dollar investments, especially in education. With stories of waste, fraud, and abuse hitting the news cycle weekly, working people’s distrust in government is rapidly growing. When less than one third of Wisconsin fourth graders can read or do math at grade level, and we have declining enrollment statewide, they wonder why it costs more to educate fewer students and what they are actually getting for their money.
When the perceived value of a four-year degree is at an all-time low across most demographics and across the political spectrum, taxpayers are growing frustrated that the UW System continues to ask for more money instead of taking meaningful steps to control costs. When the Board of Regents keeps approving tuition increases – after stating publicly that they were not happening – that public distrust balloons, and students are the ones whose bubbles get burst.
I’m frustrated, too, which is why I fought hard to include significant UW policy reforms in the current state budget. Republicans successfully negotiated to get mandatory general education credit transfer between all UW schools – including Madison – saving students both time and money while increasing their access to opportunity. Going forward, faculty will have minimum teaching hour requirements so that students are getting what they paid for, not just instruction from teaching assistants and grad students. New money in state general purpose revenue will be distributed to campuses with strings attached, not through a block grant with no accountability. To prevent further administrative bloat, the number of UW positions are now frozen. These are steps in the right direction, but we have a long way to go to reach meaningful reform.
The University of Wisconsin System has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. The ratio of administrators to students at UW Madison is 1:3, and it’s 1:4 System-wide. There are 13 campuses, all of which offer similar programming, resulting in redundant spending and competition between UW institutions at the expense of taxpayers. Because admission standards have increasingly been based on criteria other than merit, the costs of “wrap-around services” to support students who enroll but are not actually prepared for college-level academic rigor have skyrocketed.