Free Bucky, and free up more funds to keep the rest of the UW System running

As a new state budget cycle gets underway, you can bet a topic of discussion will involve the funding and future of the UW System. Even as our state has $4 billion in extra funds in its bank account, many UW campuses have suffered in recent years, including the closing of 6 2-year campuses by the start of the next school year, and 4-year campuses such as Oshkosh, Platteville, and Milwaukee having staff layoffs.

Ahead of the new legislative session, there was a Study Committee set up to go over ideas about what should happen with the UW System, to get ideas out front and flesh out measures before any bills get introduced.

To start, let's go over how the UW System gets it's funding today, courtesy of this memo from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

I'll note that one of the big reasons for that decline in state funding % is a sizable increase in gifts and federal contracts, while GPR (mostly state tax dollar funding) hasn't increased by nearly as much. None of these numbers are adjusted for inflation over the 40 years, by the way.

This is while UW System enrollment is slightly less than it was 40 years ago.

So lots of areas to start from when trying to figure out which way to go with the future of the UW System. And among the suggestions of this UW Study Committee is that it may be time to allow Bucky to go out on his own.

The first proposed recommendation was separating UW-Madison from the twelve UW System campuses.

The proposal would create a new Board of Regents to oversee UW-Madison, while maintaining the separate Board of Regents to oversee the other comprehensive universities. Two separate state appropriations to provide general purpose revenue (GPR) funding specific to UW-Madison and for the other comprehensive universities in the UW System are also included in the proposal.

Robert Venable, President and CEO of Miami Corporation Management, said that a Board of Regents that could “focus just on the comprehensive is actually more important in helping deal with those existential issues. Madison is not facing existential issues.”

That's correct, Mr. Venable. Madison has many more sources of revenue than the other UW schools do, because Madison has a higher donor base, many more research grants, and a large number of self-supporting entities.

We got an illustration in late November how things are different in Madison in the form of a move up in the national rankings for research spending.

The state flagship ranked No. 6 in research spending among more than 900 institutions, according to the latest figures released Nov. 25 by the National Science Foundation.

UW-Madison's research ranking has been a sore spot on campus since 2016, when the university fell out of the top five for the first time in nearly 45 years....

UW-Madison spent more than $1.7 billion in the 2023 fiscal year, a 14% increase from the previous year. Nearly half of the money comes from federal awards grants from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

“UW-Madison has been a research powerhouse for generations,” UW–Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said in a statement. The rise in ranking and increased spending is "further evidence of our deep commitment to bringing incredible UW–Madison expertise across disciplines to the grand challenges of our time and to translating our discoveries to improve lives at home in Wisconsin and beyond.”

A whole lot of that System-wide increase in gifts and federal contracts comes from UW-Madison through initatives such as the Carbone Cancer Center, and donations like the $175 million the Morgridges were able to raise and leverage in 2021 for a new Madison School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences. Madison also continues to see increasing enrollment (reaching nearly 52,000 this year!), and more than half of those students are from out of state and paying higher tuition, increasing the amount of money available through the tuition funding stream.

This is not the case at the other UW campuses, where more than 3/4 of the students come from Wisconsin, and another 8% of the students at those schools come from Minnesota and pay near in-state rates due to the reciprocity agreement between the two states. In addition, the other UW campuses have generally seen declines in ernollment in the last decade while the number of students in Madison has grown by more than 20%.

Change in student headcount
Fall 2014
UW-Madison 42,865
All other UW campuses 138,114

Fall 2024
UW-Madison 51,791
All other UW campuses 112,640

Those UW campuses also do not have anything resembling the amount of research focus and donor base that Madison has. So those other UW campuses need state funding a lot more than Madison does, and those schools are a key source of access to higher education, skill-growing and jobs in areas of the state that otherwise might not have a lot of that going on.

An admission that Madison has a different purpose than the rest of the UW System isn't arrogance or elitism, and neither is it a bad thing to admit that its enrollment trends are heading up while the rest of the System is not. These are facts, and we should still have the state chip in to make sure Madison's tuition is affordable for in-state students and remains an acheivable place where graduates of Wisconsin high schools can pursue higher education (in fact, maybe that's where a whole lot of Madison's state funding should go to under this separate GPR fund).

At the same time, Madison doesn't need to be put in the same pool of state aid as the other UW schools, because Madison ends up being part of an Systemwide allocation that ends up lowering the amount of state aids the non-Madison campuses (who instruct 2/3 of the students in the System) get. This also requires separate leadership that deals with Madison's unique circumstance, and doesn't try to force-feed the other UW campuses into a Madison-type research-and-donor funding system when the other campuses do not have anything close to the outside resources to be able to do what Madison does.