As a sign of the Times, 35 tenured faculty from two-year Waukesha and Washington County
campuses that had merged with UW-Milwaukee are expecting layoff notices.
It's just the latest round of job loss and campus closures across the state as the
Universities of Wisconsin Administration acts to cut costs even as it tries to boost enrollment.
A legislative study committee on the future of the UW system is grappling with just that.
A member of that committee, former UW Regent Robert Atwell, has some firm ideas about how
to move forward.
We should note, PBS Wisconsin is part of UW-Madison.
Mr. Atwell joins us now and thanks very much for being here.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Puerto Rico.
So I just want to ask, what kind of a free fall is the UW system apart from Madison in
right now?
Yeah, I mean, I think the system is facing very serious challenges and I think the
Ledge Council has become an important forum for really communicating with each other and
with people in Wisconsin about it.
You know, at the heart of it is the decline in enrollment.
The legislative fiscal bureau showed us data.
Enrollment over all in the system, I believe, since 2010 is declined from 156,000 full-time
equivalent students to 136, while Madison has grown by about 10,000 in that period.
So you know, you're looking at really a 25 to 30% decline in FTE attendance, if I'm reading
the data right, at the campuses outside of Madison, and it's been a long-term trend.
Jay Rothman, President Rothman pointed out we did have an uptick in the current year,
which is which is helpful, but you know at the heart of that, there's just hard demographic
backs, which not only at university, but institutions across the state, are trying
to deal with how to continue to serve and to take advantage of the ways we can serve
now that we didn't used to, into low growth, negative growth, aging population, we get
outside of basically a few counties.
So you were a region when the decision was made to close UW-Richland, but five more
branch campuses have taken the act since then.
What is your reaction to this manner of cost-cutting?
I mean, I respect President Rothman and my former colleagues on the Board of Regents,
who I think are actually beginning to take action.
My opinion, and I've expressed it clearly within the Regents and I express it at ledge
council, we're not acting aggressively enough, and in particular, we're not creating the
right public understanding, and we're taking incremental actions, which it's not clear
to me are actually addressing the fundamental problems.
So I mean, I am of the opinion we need to freeze, to stop closing campuses until we're
ready to have the real conversation about how we're going to configure this system to
meet the reality of the demography we have, and how we're going to do that better, which
I think many institutions, whether it's hospitals, grocery stores, banks, K-12 are rappling with
the same issues, and we're not immune to them at the university, so I think I voted
for the Regent's Center closing, but frankly, it just seems we're taking incremental actions.
Data I'd really like to see is how much to be really saved by those actions, and so I'm
not averse to the idea of kind of reconfiguring things, in fact, I'm pretty sure it's necessary
to figure out the role of tech schools, former two-year campuses, and four-year campuses,
but I don't think you're getting to the heart of our cost structure by just closing Fondelac
or the Regent's Center.
I mean, enrollment is what the enrollment is, but I would prefer, frankly, I live in rural
areas, have most of my time in the state, I think we need to preserve access locations
to the maximum extent possible, but more importantly, we've got to have the real data
and the real discussion about what's happened.
But aren't these closures just economic reality that has to be acted on right now, given
the structural deficits across the system?
Yeah, well, when you are facing long-term trends, and these are long-term trends, and
you ignore them long enough, you get yourself backed into a corner where you have decisions
between bad and worse.
And what I'm advocating is that we try to act more aggressively to define our future
rather than allowing it to happen to us and getting ourselves backed into a corner where
we allow events to dictate to us what we're going to do.
And I'd say that's what we're doing is we're reacting incrementally to facts as they exist
in the moment instead of looking at it and saying, okay, how can we, first of all, pay
our people, because I'm tired of hearing about our pay gap and not doing anything about it,
if we employ people, let's pay them at an appropriate level.
It's going to make our financial situation look worse in the near term, but it also sets
us up to make the right decisions and the good decisions.
And we have digital, we're working on digital.
I give credit to President Obama and the system for trying to develop a more aggressive digital
strategy.
But how can we keep student access places open throughout the state and serve more efficiently?
I have my ideas on how to do that.
It involves digital.
Frankly, it involves lower administrative costs.
We got to get our dollars behind the instructional staff and the people who actually do the frontline
work in those systems who, with the impact of COVID inflation, have, I mean, they're
purchasing power.
First of all, they were underpaid at the beginning of the pandemic, and they're purchasing power
has been very dramatically effective.
The level that doesn't affect higher paid people, frankly, like myself.
The inflation is an annoyance to me, but if you're a PhD person making $60,000 a year
and you lost 25% of your purchasing power, you know, we got to do something about that.
And I think we should start with that and then really look at where our actual cost
structure is and how we're going to save money and do better and keep our access points
open.
That would be the linear program I want to solve for, but we're making decisions without
really communicating to people what the problem is.
So we're reacting and we're being acted upon by events instead of defining our future.
And frankly, if you allow me to say there's a legitimate discussion about should we just
shove more money into the system overall, or should we step back, make the hard decisions
and then reinvest?
I am definitely in the second camp.
I think, except for paying our people at the median level, especially our instructional
and frontline and the lowest income people in the system, I don't advocate more funding
until we really have the conversation and formulate the hard decisions.
And again, I know President Rothman and my former region colleagues are serious about
the problems, but I've seen a lot of organizations struggle with turnarounds and we're letting
ourselves get back into a corner and then we're making decisions that people don't understand
because we haven't told them what we're really dealing with.
And these demographic problems are not new.
The declining fertility rate, the decline in young people, the aging of the population,
this is stuff that's been obvious for 10 or 15 years.
And we're not, we ignored it for a long time and now we're, anyway, I'm not letting
you ask the questions.
I'm sorry about that.
No, it's all good.
But I did want to ask you about putting money into the system.
I know that Governor Evers has said that he would recommend $800 million in the next
biennial budget to go to the UW system.
But that just seems like that's not something that would happen.
Yeah, I don't support his position.
I respect Governor Evers.
We served on the Board of Regents together before he was governor.
He was a good man.
He has his philosophy as an educator.
I think spreading more peanut butter over the current system is really going to, what
we're really going to do is fund more internal competition.
That's what we're going to do.
And I don't think that, and it will pay to further delay the hard decisions that people
in Wisconsin need us to make.
And I want us to have the courage to really put the elephants in the middle of the room
and deal with it.
You know, why are our participation rates low?
President Waffen talks about that.
They are low.
Why do people not pursue higher education here?
The same degree they do in other states, even surroundings.
And why is that?
I know Jay and the system have the reasons they give, but I'm not sure we're listening
enough to our non-customers.
Like, what is it they don't see about what we do as having value for them and their lives?
Well, in fact, I heard on that committee, I heard a lot of skepticism about the value
of a college degree.
Do you think that skepticism is misplaced?
Well, let me say, I'm a big believer in education.
I wouldn't have spent a lot of time in the last eight years thinking, working about it.
I wouldn't have put eight of my kids to the UW system if I didn't believe in the importance
of it.
I believe in the value of higher ed, but I also know it's not for everybody.
And I don't think that President Waffen and I have had this exchange.
I don't think saying that if you go to college and we give you a degree, you're going to
take $900,000 more of the course of your lifetime.
I think that's misleading because it basically appropriates to the university all of the
differences that go into someone who chooses to attend college and achieves that outcome.
So I think we add value.
I don't think we add as much value as we seem to suggest.
And I think that there are people who probably could really benefit from going to college
and I think we're doing the work to try to get marginal groups in there.
I'm 100% in favor of that, but we got to be realistic about can they succeed?
And are we really as valuable as we think we are?
We're just telling ourselves what we want to think about ourselves.
And I think it's I think it's factually incorrect that the so-called college premium, there's
a lot of literature on that.
It's not the university that causes all of the different outcomes.
So it's a lot of factors, including parents, including K-12, including churches, community
groups, neighborhoods, all of that stuff goes into helping someone succeed in life, whether
they go to college or not.
And so I think the skepticism has some credibility to it.
I think I said this at the meeting.
When people criticize what you're doing, you don't have to affirm everything they're saying
to listen to them and take them seriously.
I think we've had a tendency to tell ourselves what we want to think.
We want that.
We want to think what their motives are, rather than asking focus groups, you know, like so.
Former.
You have enough of me for getting ready?
You're done with me already?
Former UW System Regent, Bob Atwell.
Thanks so much.
All right.
Thank you.
That does it.
Save my hate now.
You can hold it to me if you want.
You were great.
Thank you.