At the top of the list for Wisconsin institutions was the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where median earnings four years out of school topped $93,000.
Coming in at No. 2 was Marquette University, where undergraduates earned nearly $80,000. Bellin College, a private nursing school in Green Bay came in third, with students earning about $79,000.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison ($75,084) and Viterbo University ($70,471) rounded out the top five.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed a civil rights complaint against the University of Wisconsin Jan. 12 on behalf of the Young America’s Foundation, a student organization on campus that seeks to educate students and promote traditional conservative values, according to YAF.
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word.
Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” said Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But students will not do it.”
Dr. Anita Bhattacharyya, an associate professor of cell and regenerative biology in the school of medicine and public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she was hoping to apply for a future NIH grant to study human fetal tissue research and will now not be able to do so.
Bhattacharyya explained she currently uses human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which are reprogrammed cells that are similar to embryonic stem cells, in her work. However, the loss of NIH funding for human fetal tissue research could affect future work.
“My reaction was, ‘How are we going to do some of our research if we can no longer use human fetal tissue?'” she recalled to ABC News. “In particular, my lab studies Down syndrome and so we know that in Down syndrome, the brain develops differently to lead to the intellectual disability that people with Down syndrome have.”
“I well understand the significant uncertainties and heightened scrutiny many universities are now facing,” Mnookin wrote to members of the Columbia University community. “Moments like this demand, in my view, an urgent assertion of the role universities must play in civic life, a clear articulation of both our value and our values, and, simultaneously, a genuine openness to taking seriously the views of those who see the world differently, both inside our campus and in the broader world.”
Meanwhile, UW System President Jay Rothman plans to name an interim chancellor for UW-Madison before Mnookin departs in May.
In October, Harvard indicated it would significantly reduce the number of new PhD students it admitted. Yale, Columbia, Brown, the University of Southern California, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania are examples of schools that also scaled back, rescinded, paused or stopped new admissions. Large public universities — such as the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University and the University of Washington— took similar steps.
Hundreds gathered in negative windchill in solidarity with the city of Minneapolis and rallied for no Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence on UW’s campus at Library Mall, Jan. 27.
Madison Students for a Democratic Society held the rally in response to the presence of ICE operations across the U.S. and ICE agents killing two Minneapolis residents, according to their Instagram.
UW-Madison is going ahead with plans to demolish a small building on the west side of campus to create more faculty parking and green space, opening up space for future development.
The UW Board of Regents on Wednesday approved the university’s request to raze the vacant building at 1800 University Ave. to make way for the additional parking spots, about a block west of Breese Terrace.
Wisconsin Republican lawmakers want to limit the University of Wisconsin System’s academic and research collaboration with six countries amid concerns over national security and foreign influence in education.
The bill, which passed the Assembly on Jan. 22, prohibits study abroad, dual degree programs and research collaborations with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Qatar. While there are currently no UW-Madison programs in four of the targeted countries, the university has three study abroad programs in China and one flagship program in Russia.
When Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin took over at the University of Wisconsin-Madison four years ago, she entered an unwinnable situation.
Republican legislators immediately criticized her as an out-of-touch coastal elite, and she was forced to handle many of the issues that would plague her term as chancellor — debates over anti-semitism and how campuses could support free speech while upholding an environment inclusive of all students.
Students from UW-Madison filled Library Mall to protest ICE activity across the country and show solidarity with Minneapolis residents on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026 in Madison, Wis. The protest, organized by Students for a Democratic Society Madison, intended to “show the campus, the city, the state, and the Trump administration the students will not allow this to continue unobstructed,” according to the organization’s social media.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) will renew calls for university divestment from Israel, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and military operations in Venezuela while remaining civil with the university as the organization returns to campus Jan. 15 following a six-month suspension, a member told The Daily Cardinal.
Tensions were high at the University of Wisconsin in May 2024. Protesters were nearly two weeks into an encampment meant to pressure the state’s flagship to divest from Israel in response to its bombing campaign in Gaza. Families were already arriving in Madison for commencement.
Hundreds of University of Wisconsin-Madison students braved freezing temperatures Tuesday evening to gather on Library Mall, demanding university leaders declare the campus a sanctuary for immigrant students following recent ICE-related deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
When Jennifer Mnookin joined UW-Madison in 2022 as its chancellor, she faced declining state funding, a decadelong tuition freeze, then campus protests and an onslaught of federal research cuts.
But during her nearly four years in the position, Mnookin built a track record of forging deals with critics of her leadership or the university itself, such as breaking ground on the hard-fought new engineering building, despite frequent opposition from the Republican-led Legislature.
Since the resignation of the last permanent University president, Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s board of trustees has tapped both its own CEO of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a fellow trustee to fill the seat. The next permanent president, however, has no affiliation with Columbia.
Wisconsin legislators haven’t directed a ton of their attention to higher education issues during the current legislative session, lobbyist Jack O’Meara said.
“It just seems generally that it’s not at the top of the list of items that are being discussed … so I don’t see a whole lot of bills moving,” said O’Meara, who advocates on behalf of faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison through an organization called PROFS.
Jennifer Mnookin forged compromises with protesters and politicians at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now, she faces her biggest test.
Columbia University’s new president is already facing opposition from anti-Israel rabble-rousers, who have condemned her for previous actions taken against leftist encampments at her last college.
Campus and community leaders are congratulating Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as she prepares to step down as leader of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and Athletic Director Chris McIntosh consider the performance of and expectations for the Wisconsin Badgers football team in a changing college sports landscape.
he Universities of Wisconsin announced Sunday that UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin was hired as the new president of Columbia University. Mnookin will remain in her role through the spring commencement.
Here are 5 things to know.
From her own ice cream flavor to a tense standoff with pro-Palestinian protesters and battles with the Legislature and the Trump administration over DEI, Jennifer Mnookin made a mark during her four years as chancellor at UW-Madison. On Sunday she was named the next president of Columbia University.
Here are highlights from her tenure in Madison.
Almost four years after Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin stepped in to lead UW-Madison, Columbia University has tapped her as its new president.
Mnookin, 58, will succeed acting president Claire Shipman. Mnookin will remain in her role in Madison through spring commencement and start at the New York university on July 1, Columbia announced Sunday. Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said he will appoint an interim chancellor after her departure.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin is leaving at the end of the school year for a job as president of Columbia University.
Mnookin, 58, started at UW in August 2022 after 17 years at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. A search for her replacement will begin later this year.
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin is set to leave the University of Wisconsin-Madison after this school year to become the new president of Columbia University in New York.
Columbia University has selected University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin as its next president.
Mnookin has led the state’s flagship university since 2022.
In a statement Sunday, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said Mnookin brought “unbounded energy, resilience, and deeply thoughtful leadership to the position.
Jennifer Mnookin has led the flagship campus of the state university system since 2022. She takes the helm at Columbia after a tumultuous period.
Columbia University has selected Jennifer Mnookin, a legal scholar and current chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as its next president.
Columbia University has named its next president.
The board of trustees has appointed Jennifer Mnookin to lead the university. Mnookin, 58, currently serves as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a nationally recognized legal scholar.
She’ll start in the role on July 1.
UW-Madison is cancelling classes on Friday due to extreme cold.
Bitterly cold temperatures are expected to begin on Friday and continue into the weekend. An Extreme Cold Warning has been issued for Dane County from midnight to 1 p.m. Friday, with wind chills expected in the range of -30-40 F.
Gov. Tony Evers told The Daily Cardinal in an interview Wednesday he is in the process of negotiating with the Legislature what will be done with the state’s budget surplus, but does not have a specific answer whether the University of Wisconsin System will receive any additional funding.
Through the Senior Guest Auditor Program, Wisconsin residents aged 60 and older take UW-Madison courses free of charge alongside students less than half their age. This fall, the program reached a record enrollment of more than 1,000 auditors, double the number enrolled a decade ago, according to program administrator Anne Niendorf. The program places older adults alongside traditional undergraduates in lecture halls across campus, creating multigenerational classrooms.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison cancelled Friday classes due to freezing weather conditions for the first time since 2019, according to a news release.
The cancellation of all lectures, labs and discussion sections comes after the National Weather Service placed Dane County under an Extreme Cold Warning from midnight to 1 p.m. Friday, with wind chills projected to range from 30 to 40 degrees below zero.
Last year, just as she was finishing a teacher residency program through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, federal funding for the project was cut by the Trump administration.
“So we were in the spring semester and we were all like, are we going to be able to continue?” Lind said. “Are we going to still be able to get our teaching license? Are we going to have to pay this back?”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison canceled classes Jan. 23, though all other campus operations will continue as normal. It marks the 13th weather-related closure for the state flagship since 1965.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has canceled classes for Friday, January 23, according to a release.
Cold temperatures are expected to start Friday and continue through the weekend.
Only the chancellor or someone authorized to act on their behalf has the authority to cancel classes, suspend services or close the campus or any campus building to the public, students and employees.
The university’s general philosophy? Remain open whenever possible.
UW-Madison has picked its first leader of the Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub, the initiative launched last fall to encourage more startups on campus and boost Wisconsin’s economic growth.
Lewis Sheats will serve as associate vice chancellor and executive director. Sheats previously served as executive director of Saint Louis University’s center for entrepreneurship and spent two decades at North Carolina State University as assistant vice provost for entrepreneurship. His first day at UW-Madison is Feb. 2
The doors of a new academic building will open, three-year-old scaffolding is expected to come down, and designs are being drawn up to revamp a historic site on UW-Madison’s campus in 2026.
Upcoming plans for development projects at UW-Madison signal another busy year of changes happening on campus. In 2025, UW-Madison notably opened a new building that houses its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence: Morgridge Hall, a privately funded $267 million, 343,000-square-foot facility.
One of the first signs of trouble came last spring, when the Trump administration abruptly moved to deport scores of international students, including a handful at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University officials were alarmed, well aware that around 8,000 students, 15 percent of its enrollment, were from abroad. And they worried that the looming deportations might spook prospective international students, said Frances Vavrus, the dean of the international division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A number of University of Wisconsin schools are being recognized for their community engagement.
UW-Madison, UW-Whitewater, UW-Eau Claire, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside and UW-Superior are designated as Carnegie Community Engagement Classified campuses.
Avtar Roopra’s research has effectively stalled since President Donald Trump started his second term and upended the federal research funding landscape. Agencies have cut projects, delayed grant reviews, fired thousands of federal employees who offer guidance to researchers and reduced the number of new projects getting funding.
“This is like the Holy Grail of epilepsy, what we’ve been looking for for hundreds of years,” Roopra said. “All of it is on hold. It’s extremely frustrating.”
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed a civil rights complaint against the University of Wisconsin-Madison on behalf of conservative students on campus.
The firm alleges the school is offering about two dozen race-based scholarships. WILL is asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate “race-based practices” on behalf of its client, the Young America’s Foundation.
The organization is set to provide $206.9 million in total support to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research this school year, including $50 million toward research projects and nearly $36 million for faculty, graduate students and staff.
Now in its second century, the nonprofit faces challenges, though. The Trump administration’s widespread cuts to federal research funding could limit the number of discoveries coming to WARF.
If your impression is that there are more female students than male students at UW-Madison, you’re not wrong.
In 2025, the university enrolled almost 1,000 fewer men (3,800) than women (4,744) as first-year students. Also, according to data from the university’s office of the registrar, male students are less likely to stay at the university and less likely to graduate on time than women.
One of the proposed constitutional amendments, SJR 94, takes aim at DEI programs throughout state and local government in Wisconsin. Republicans have been targeting DEI programs for years and have at times found success, including when they elicited concessions from the University of Wisconsin system in 2023.
UW-Madison should centralize its human resources operations and consolidate its capital projects into one plan in order to improve oversight, a third-party report commissioned by the university recommends.
The report, which was completed by consulting firm Deloitte, highlighted issues with the school’s HR structure that led to inconsistencies in recruiting, payment and salary adjustment. The university was also found to have limited coordination on capital projects leading to inefficient planning.
In 2025, the Universities of Wisconsin had another packed year.
The fallout from the Trump administration canceling students’ visas, federal funding uncertainty for research, the closure of a branch campus and downsizing of another, the rollout of new policies faculty called controversial and campuswide budget cuts at UW-Madison are just a few of the moments the State Journal covered.
There were many hot topics in higher education in 2025. Here are five of them.
The consulting firm Deloitte is recommending changes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison following the demotion of the school’s diversity leader over financial concerns.
UW-Madison paid Deloitte $395,000 to evaluate its financial and budgetary controls between March and July 2025, according to Mark Pitsch, a spokesperson for the broader UW system, which signed the contract with the firm.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has reclaimed its status among the top five institutions nationally for research spending – the highest ranking the state flagship has earned since 2014.
UW-Madison’s national research ranking has been a sore spot on campus for a decade after the university fell out of the top five for the first time in nearly 45 years. It dropped to No. 8 in 2018. UW-Madison officials at the time attributed the slide in rankings to state budget cuts and the loss of senior faculty members.
UW-Madison is among the top five universities in the country for research spending — the highest ranking the institution has earned since 2014.
A National Science Foundation survey released Tuesday ranked UW-Madison No. 5 out of 925 universities for the $1.93 billion it spent for research in fiscal year 2024, which ran from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.
Established in 1960, the center says it provides “state-of-the-art resources, including supercomputers, research aircraft, sophisticated computer models and extensive data sets” to the atmospheric and related Earth system science community. It’s funded through the National Science Foundation.
Among other things, the center has helped improve early warnings in weather forecasts and air safety, the American Meteorological Society said in a statement.
Aaron Seligman, a Madison native who previously worked for the Universities of Wisconsin, joined the cohort in February when taking on the new title of director of community relations at Madison Hillel.
The 13 professionals “take on the work of being that adult in the room that models and leads in relationship building with administrators, faculty and other Jewish communal professionals,” Simon said.
Seligman is focusing on areas the University of Wisconsin-Madison found specific needs for in the more than two years since Oct. 7. So far, Seligman has been “collaborating with the university administration on campus policies” and “engaging in media around campus climate and antisemitism,” Seligman said.
Two-thirds of Wisconsin residents hold a favorable opinion of the state’s 16 technical colleges, and a majority believe the state benefits from the education the schools provide.
Those are two findings from a statewide public perception study the Wisconsin Technical College System conducted online this spring, with over 2,300 adults completing the blind survey.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are sounding the alarm over a Trump administration plan to dismantle a prominent weather and climate research center, saying it could jeopardize the future of weather forecasting.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research is based in Boulder, Colorado, but is overseen by a consortium of universities, including UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee. The center allows researchers to work together on large projects that no one scientist or university could do alone.
In the Midwest, Indiana, Purdue, and Illinois show similar bottlenecks. In the Northeast, Northeastern’s combined engineering-CS programs have become harder to crack than many Ivy divisions. Even the University of Wisconsin, once known for broad access, now reports sharply lower admit rates in engineering and data science.
For parents and students, the message is sobering: the real competition may not be “between” colleges, but “within” them.
The number of alcohol unit sales at Badgers games at Camp Randall Stadium in 2025 fell 21% compared to the first year of availability at general concession stands in 2024.
That decrease was slightly more than the 20% falloff in the number of fans in the venue between the two seasons. Records obtained through public records requests showed there were slightly fewer alcoholic beverage units sold per ticket scanned in 2025 than in 2024.
