It's all across the world, they get these super high resolution images, and the applications
are for things like forest fires, natural disasters, but also for developers and stuff
like this.
Does he live in Denver?
He does.
And he does the coding for that, I don't know, you know, and all of that is extremely
foreign to me, but I am pleased that he came back to get his masters at the Nelson Institute.
Yeah, good for him.
A real applicable one, yeah.
Well, GIS mapping, that's a big, a lot of demand there.
Yeah, hopefully.
Steve, can I get that hand-clap, just put your hands up here and perfect.
Great.
Thank you.
Yeah, that was a big gnat that he just got.
All right, so we will begin in earnest.
But I wanted to first start by asking you, when you first learned that UW branch campuses
in West Bend and Fond du Lac would end in-person instruction, what was your reaction?
I think my reaction was not total surprise that I've watched the enrollment struggles
at the branch campuses that were attached five years ago to those institutions who were
struggling the most in enrollment themselves at their own campus, UW Platteville, UW Oshkosh,
UW Milwaukee are the ones that come to mind that over the last 10 years have gradually
but very clearly decreased in enrollment.
So my concern was at those campuses was that they were convenient casualties of enrollment
challenges at the four-year institutions, which they were attached to.
If you look back at 2018, well, let's go back a little farther than that when the UW colleges
from the state funding cuts in the 15-17 biennium under the previous administration, the UW
college is regionalized in order to reduce the number of administrators overseeing those
at that time the two-year campuses, what are now the branch campuses, and the recruiting
model that we put into place actually began to show results.
If you look at the enrollments at the two-year campuses in 2018, there was actually an uptick
in those enrollments at, I think, at least 11 or 12 of the 13 two-year campuses.
And then when the UW colleges and UW extension were dissolved by the UW system leadership
in 2018, that began a very precipitous drop in enrollments at the two-year campuses starting
in 2019 that brought us to the current day.
And if you look at, again, those campuses that were attached at that time to UW Milwaukee,
Oshkosh, and Plattville, the connection is very, very clear that that did not help
those campuses.
So how should the UW respond to following enrollment and with it budgets that are in
the red, not just on two-year campuses, but across the system?
Well, this didn't happen overnight.
This really was a condition that evolved over a number of years.
The situations that we're seeing today were seen years ago.
We saw softening in the number of high school graduates in this state.
We saw the eventual effect of the 2008 recession and what it was going to do to incoming freshman
classes at the university level starting here in 2025.
And I would flip that paradigm that you just described.
I would contend that enrollment is not the problem.
Enrollment is the symptom that evolved from the problem of not adequately managing as
a UW system the supply and demand across its universities.
And that's called enrollment management.
And we have not had a system-wide enrollment management strategy literally since 2004-2005.
Do you think, though, that the state of Wisconsin and its public UW institutions, are there
too many of them given the demographics?
I think that's a discussion we have to have.
And I could give you arguments both ways as to why there are too many and why there
are not too many.
We are built in higher education.
We're built quite differently than many other states.
We don't have a statewide community college system in Wisconsin.
In other states, the community colleges serve as the feeders, the primary feeders, to new
university students coming in at the freshman level.
And at a community college, a student can go eventually on the university track toward
a bachelor's degree or on the occupational and applied learning track in the form of
a two-year certificate or an associate's degree that are more geared at training for a particular
occupation or job.
In Wisconsin, we've historically had three community colleges in the form of M.A.T.C.
in Madison, M.A.T.C. in Milwaukee, and Nicollet Technical College in Rhinelander.
And since there have been a couple of other flavors on that theme, but we don't have a
community college network in this state that blankets the state and serves as that feeder.
So our four-year universities, and I would take Madison very much out of this mix, but
our four-year universities have served as feeders.
There are both good and bad to that, and I won't go into the specifics.
But we have to have that conversation before we begin shutting doors forever and backing
out of agreements with communities who put up real money to build and maintain these
campuses.
We have to step back and put a moratorium on any more door closures and have this conversation
about where we're going with this in higher education in Wisconsin.
Have you spoken with the system President J. Rothman about this?
I have not because, like many of my former colleagues in UW colleges and UW Extension,
I retired in 2020.
I've been very happily retired.
I've been active in some other sectors of higher education in other states, as well
as Wisconsin.
And I've pretty much taken the opinion that it's someone else's discussion to have at
this point.
And what the current activity of closing branch campuses has told me is it's never not the
moment for me to engage and others like me to engage in this conversation because we're
all very concerned about the future of the UW system, but how it extends to people in
all communities of the state.
In fact, you said that what you're seeing is the disintegration of the system, and you
are concerned that it will get worse.
How so?
I think that the two-year campuses are in a very vulnerable spot.
They have been attached to four-year campuses who will continue to see enrollment pressures,
and I think that the commitment and the promise that the UW system and the Board of Regents
made to those communities back in the 1960s in exchange they got these campuses all on
the local property tax dollar.
I'm afraid that commitment and that partnership has been put off to the side and out of the
conversation.
We have to put that right back in the middle of the conversation because that's how these
communities came to be.
When Fondelac County came forward in 1967 to build what is today UW-Oshgosh Fondelac
and for much of its existence was UW-Fondelac.
Fondelac County did that not just to provide an access point to the University of Wisconsin
system.
They did it for long-term economic stimulus, economic support, enrichment of the community,
to bring culture and societal benefits to Fondelac County.
They did that for a whole host of reasons and I don't see that discussion taking place.
And so I think the UW system has a higher level of obligation to communities for those
two-year branch campuses that used to be part of UW colleges, even then it does owe
those communities for the four-year campuses that are in other towns and cities.
Who's to blame?
I really have resisted conversations that have a tendency to place blame because that
does not move us forward.
It's important to understand the various perspectives and how we got here.
But who's to blame has nothing to do with how we go forward.
What is the best path forward?
Unfortunately, I haven't seen a willingness of the UW system or the technical college
system, much less the two of them in partnership.
I have not seen a willingness to have a broad public strategic conversation about where
we're going with higher education in Wisconsin.
I am calling on the legislature to throw that yellow flag on the field to use a football
metaphor to say time out.
We're doing things that are permanent.
We're doing things that will have lifelong negative consequences on communities, for
which we have a high level of obligation and we're closing doors to higher education at
a time when this state needs a higher level of degree holders.
It needs better paying jobs.
We are becoming much less attractive to high school graduates in the UW system than we
were even seven years ago.
From the system's own data in around 2016, we were attracting 31% of new high school
graduates into the UW system and just five years later that had dropped to 27% of the
high school graduates in this state were moving directly into the UW system.
That is a dramatic change in attraction to high school graduates looking toward their
future.
We have to open that can of worms to really take a close look at what we're doing and
how we want to move forward as a state and whether or not the existing structures of
the UW system and the technical colleges which again are very different from those in other
states are serving our citizens and our residents in Wisconsin the very best that they can.
All right.
Steve Guiltak.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Wow.
There is a lot to talk about.
How did we do?
I think it was good.
Because I went way longer.