Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced in a State of the University speech to the UW-Madison Faculty Senate Monday that she is asking the Board of Regents to raise tuition for out-of-state and professional students.
Blank said in-state tuition will most likely remain frozen in the first year of the biennium. She told The Daily Cardinal that she does not believe that tuition will affect student enrollment, noting that applicant rates continue to rise.
Noel Radomski, the associate researcher and managing director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, said more information needs to be shown about fall enrollment statistics. He said the prices are increasing due to the need to diversify revenue, which means getting tuition from out-of-state and professional students. However, he thinks that academic qualifications of students needs to be looked at more as well.
“She’s talking about one strategy as it relates to revenue and enrollment,” Radomski said. “What she hasn’t talked about yet, and I’m surprised she hasn’t, is that she’s going to take a market-based approach to enrollment. What impact will that have on segments of the population that have difficulty paying or don’t fully understand the grants?”
He said that he wonders if UW-Madison is trying to become more “elite” and accepting more out-of-state students and less Wisconsin students.
Associated Students of Madison Student Council Representative for the College of Letters & Sciences Katrina Morrison said she agrees that the potential tuition raise will make it more difficult for students of lower economic statuses to attend UW-Madison.
“I think we need to figure out other ways to bring in revenue than raising international student tuition,” Morrison said. “I definitely want the university to continue to support the freeze, but I think we need to figure out how to best do that without disenfranchising and hurting other students.”
University Communications Director John Lucas said that UW communications and the chancellor does not have any comment regarding the critiques.
“I can share that our applications are at an all-time high [32,887] and our overall enrollment 43,338 is larger than recent years' and comparable to 2015,” Lucas said in an e-mail.
