The Associated Students of Madison’s final Shared Governance Week of Action forum Thursday sparked discussion about how to handle the costs of University of Wisconsin System schools in the face of decreasing state funding and increasing tuition and fees.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Student Services Finance Committee Chair Ellie Bruecker and UW System Regent Katherine Pointer, the student appointee on the Board of Regents, each voiced their own ideas on how best to raise and manage universities’ funds.
Pointer, who voted in favor of increasing tuition for all UW System schools when the Regents raised UW-Madison tuition to over $10,000 in June, said students were the only group they could draw on to generate revenue.
At UW-Madison, where faculty compensation is 20 percent below the national average, retention of the university’s exceptional educators is a top concern, according to Pointer.
“They’re the core of why Madison is so incredible,” she said.
According to Pointer, tuition at UW-Madison is low compared to that at its peer universities.
However, Bruecker said she opposes tuition and fee increases and instead emphasized fiscal responsibility. She said students have been more responsible in managing segregated fees, which SSFC allocates to student organizations and other services which benefit students, than the state has been at managing its part of the budget.
“This year, we’re really just working hard to make sure that students can pay a little bit less and still receive all of the wonderful services that this university has to offer,” Bruecker said.
Both Bruecker and Pointer said it is important the state continues to invest in higher education due to the positive influence universities can have on the state’s economy. Additionally, both said the Wisconsin community feels an affinity toward the state’s public universities such as UW-Madison.
Pointer said advocating for the importance of higher education at the state level will be instrumental in the amount of state funding public universities receive in the coming years, with the current state of the economy leading to repeated tuition increases.
“Moving forward, we can’t continue to rely on students to fill that funding gap,” she said.
