Devesh Ranjan looked through his calendar last summer, trying to pick a date to start as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new engineering dean.
Ranjan chose June 16, 2025 — “a very meaningful day for me.” Twenty-two years earlier, on that date, he arrived at UW-Madison as a graduate student to study mechanical engineering.
The results of the DCF survey align with a UW-Madison study that also found two-thirds of providers would consider cutting staff pay while half felt it would be more difficult to provide a high-quality experience.
The army of small, white food delivery robots crisscrossing the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus for the past seven years have vanished, destined for city streets around the world as the company behind them transitions from mobile campus snack packs to grocery delivery drones.
Matthew Mors, like countless others who have recently departed college, had to figure out what he was going to do.
The former University of Wisconsin men’s basketball forward from Yankton, South Dakota, wasn’t with the Badgers very long. He never officially played in a game during his lone season with Badgers in 2021-22, and his four-year playing career with only one school, South Dakota State, ended this past March. So, Mors smiled when asked if he had expected to don the motion W logo — the one stitched to the left side of his gray polo at Wisconsin’s advanced camp June 18 — ever again.
Fast forward to today, and the end is nowhere in sight.
About four in 10 interns still don’t make money, according to some labor estimates.“It still feels kind of ludicrous in 2026 that we’re still having this conversation,” said Matthew Hora, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies the transition from higher education to the labor market.
Research varies about the scale of Wisconsin’s housing shortage, but according to the think tank Forward Analytics, the state needs somewhere between 84,000 and 140,000 new units of housing by 2030 to keep up with population demand.
“Which is a short time period,” said Kurt Paulsen, who teaches and researches affordable housing finance and policy at UW-Madison.
Hong grew up in Madison’s Eagle Heights community, a neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Her parents emigrated from South Korea to the U.S. in the late 1980s. Her dad is a researcher at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center and her mom was a music teacher.
