Effective March 9, the UW System Board of Regents suspended undergraduate admissions to all UW System campuses. Regents said the decision was necessary in light of additional budget cuts the university currently faces.
Last week, the state Legislature's Joint Finance Committee proposed additional cuts to the university aside from the $50.5 million cuts already suggested in Gov. Scott McCallum's budget reform bill. This was done through cuts to the university's budget as well as an 8 percent cap on tuition increases, changed from the original 10 percent McCallum proposed.
\The regents [on Friday] morning ordered the president of the System and all the chancellors to suspend sending out offers of admission to any more students until we have a chance to analyze the impact of the Joint Finance Committee's actions on our budget,"" UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said.
Board of Regents President Jay Smith supported this decision by saying that the university has no choice in the matter.
""We must operate like a business,"" he said. ""We can't enroll students if we don't have the [general purpose revenue] to pay for them.""
However, Smith he does not want the measure to be permanent.
""It is my hope that this admissions freeze is a temporary one and can be lifted in the near future,"" he said.
Smith said he met with UW System chancellors Friday morning before the regents made the decision.
Friday's action will have little impact on the daily operations of the UW-Madison admissions office. According to Wiley, applications will continue to be accepted and reviewed. However, letters of acceptance will not be mailed until the Board of Regents has reviewed the effects of the budget cuts on each of the university's 26 campuses and decided whether it is fiscally possible to continue admitting students.
""[The regents] don't want us to be admitting more students than we can effectively serve with a quality education,"" Wiley said.
Also, the admissions suspension will likely affect each UW campus differently.
""It will differ from one campus to another,"" Wiley said. ""Each of us has to analyze our own situation and tell [UW System] President [Katherine] Lyall where we think we are now and how many more students we think we can accommodate, if any, and then we will be told if we can make any more offers [of admission] or not.""
Wiley declined to comment on the number of students already accepted to UW-Madison this year and the number presently awaiting notification.
""I've asked our admissions office to do a very careful analysis of exactly where we are,"" he said.
The action by the Board of Regents will not affect students who have already been admitted to the university for the coming year.
