New changes from the Trump administration set stricter borrowing limits on students in professional programs like medical school. The head of one of Wisconsin’s medical colleges expects the change will add new barriers for people training to become doctors.
Incoming Wisconsin students will pay in-state tuition at a public Iowa university starting this fall.
The University of Northern Iowa is offering in-state tuition to new first-year and transfer undergraduate students from its neighboring states, including Wisconsin, in the next academic year in an effort to attract students from throughout the Midwest.
Wisconsin residents will now pay in-state tuition if they decide to attend the University of Northern Iowa.
The Iowa Board of Regents approved the new tuition rates on Wednesday for Wisconsin and the five states bordering Iowa.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to create a new administrative unit to collaborate with the business community amid campus-wide budget cuts, led by a new Associate Vice Chancellor for Entrepreneurship who will drive business growth at the university “beyond patents.”
The 2025-27 Capitol Budget passed at the beginning of July includes $7 million for virtual mental health services to University of Wisconsin students at all campuses apart from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The inclusion of the funding follows a bill introduced by Sen. Jesse James, R-Thorp, and Senate Republicans on June 2 to address mental health issues among UW System students.
New federal loan restrictions passed as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act are expected to reshape how thousands of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pay for their education, potentially increasing reliance on private loans and reducing access for low-income families.
Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) announced plans in late June to cancel “University of the Air” along with three other legacy shows in part because of federal and state funding challenges.
Like the Skobot, most new A.I. technologies developed by Native scientists are designed for a specific language community. Jacqueline Brixey, a computer scientist formerly at the University of Southern California and now joining the University of Wisconsin, created a chatbot called “Masheli” that can communicate in Choctaw. Drawing from a collection of animal stories, the chatbot can listen and respond to users in both English and the target language, helping conversational skills.
A software program UW-Madison faculty and students use on a daily basis has added artificial intelligence tools to assist with grading and summarizing discussion posts.
But the university says some of the tools could run afoul of guidance it provides instructors against using AI to automate student feedback.
This year, Rutgers University-New Brunswick launched a center offering students a food pantry, a free textbook rental program, a clothing closet, a lounge and more. The pantry is designed to feel like a mini Trader Joe’s with baskets and rows of shelves filled with fresh produce, frozen meat and non-perishable goods.
True, the Tesla Resistance didn’t have the revolutionary romance of yesteryear: running through tear gas at the U of Wisconsin Dow Chemical demo (it made napalm) hand in hand with my then-girlfriend, Judy, who would soon leave me for a history grad student and break my heart. It didn’t have the grit of the People’s Park sieges in Berkeley in ’69, getting kicked in the stomach by Alameda County sheriff’s deputies on the way to the Santa Rita jail, throwing debris at the Northside home of H-bomb avatar Edward Teller. It didn’t even offer the thrill of marching across the Brooklyn Bridge during Occupy Wall Street and seeing the beacon of the 99 percent beamed onto the blank corporate slab of the Verizon Building, proclaiming ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE.
“Don’t leave your seat at the end of the third quarter,” they wrote. “That’s when Wisconsin fans ‘Jump Around’ to the 1992 House of Pain classic of the same name, often causing Camp Randall to shake and vibrate. The tradition started in 1998, took a very brief, highly controversial hiatus in 2003 and became a rallying cry during the Badgers’ development into a Big Ten powerhouse under former coaches Barry Alvarez and Bret Bielema.”
Republican lawmakers are proposing a state law to limit tuition increases after the University of Wisconsin system approved another tuition hike earlier this month.
Students for Justice in Palestine announced in a social media post Sunday that the Registered Student Organization had been suspended from the University of Wisconsin campus for violating university policies at an April protest.
As college students locally and nationally struggle to feed themselves due to rising costs and other challenges, schools have tried to find ways to address the growing needs. UW-Madison and Madison College recently expanded their pantries and offerings, and UW-Madison hired a full-time employee just to concentrate on students’ basic needs.
The bill was introduced following a report by news platform Wisconsin Right Now, which found that the University of Wisconsin System employs nearly 500 foreign workers on H-1B visas, with salaries totaling almost $43 million annually. The report also noted rising tuition rates at the same institutions.
Universities did great things during the 20th century. Presidents and faculty found strength and legitimacy through relevance. They helped in the all-out effort to win the Second World War. Universities anticipated the needs of the Cold War. Research labs produced products that improved people’s daily lives. The University of Minnesota patented Honeycrisp apples. The University of Wisconsin patented fortifying milk with vitamin D.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension is ending its 30-year-old FoodWIse nutrition education program and laying off more than 90 people after losing a federal grant.
Michael Notaro, director of UW–Madison’s Center for Climatic Research launched STEM camps in Beloit, Wisconsin Dells and at Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo with a simple mission: make science accessible to all children with neurodivergences – but the camps are at risk.
“The main goals of the camps is to support the kind of interest and pursuit of science, degrees and careers, to foster and support neurodiversity and to celebrate it,” Notaro said.
The camp is organized in collaboration with Dr. Michael Notaro, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With prior funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Notaro and his team have led similar camps in Beloit, Madison, and Wisconsin Dells.
However, future programming is uncertain. Federal support for the camps ended earlier this year when NSF grants were discontinued. While funding remains in place for this summer’s sessions, organizers are seeking alternative sources to continue beyond 2025.
FoodWIse, a statewide program providing nutrition education to low-income families and community organizations, announced on Friday that its federal funding is being eliminated.
Dr. Michael Notaro, director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, launched the program several years ago.
“I think that’s inspired by my son Hayden,” Notaro said. “He’s autistic and a wonderful boy. My wife is also autistic. And based on my desire to support and foster neurodiversity, we created three STEM camps.”
Written by James Dahlberg, a professor emeritus in the department of biomolecular chemistry at UW-Madison.
After three successful shows in the last month at Camp Randall — the first in 28 years — Madison is back on the map for the biggest musical acts. The city, its boosters and the university should do everything it can to keep it that way.
A support group for parents of New York University students boasts nearly 8,000 members and averages several posts a day; one for the University of Wisconsin has nearly 9,000 parents.
Among his losing battles was the 1970s fight over merging the University of Wisconsin in Madison with other state campuses to form the UW System. He was against it, as were his constituents on the Madison campus. He fought enacting a state lottery and opposed building the so-called SuperMax prison that Tommy Thompson later admitted was a big mistake.
Campus leaders have publicly disclosed only the overall scale of cuts, announcing in June that schools and colleges need to shrink their budgets by 5% and administrative units face a 7% cut. They’ve called the step needed “to help protect our long-term financial viability” and said layoffs should be considered “a last resort.”
Researchers at Northwestern University, Northeastern University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison analyzed the careers of 12,000 U.S.-based faculty across 15 disciplines, including business, sociology and chemistry.
They evaluated publication outcomes over an 11-year span, which includes the five years before and after those scholars got tenure. Last week, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America published the results of that analysis in a peer-reviewed paper, “Tenure and Research Trajectories.”
Nobody voted for higher costs, crowded classes and less research at the UW, writes Jordan Ellenburg in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Ideas Lab column. The UW-Madison math professor explains how federal budget cuts are undermining decades of the university’s contributions to industry and the dangers that presents to the economy.
Two Republican lawmakers aim to restrict how much in-state undergraduate tuition can increase at University of Wisconsin System campuses.
Rep. Dave Murphy, R-Greeville, and Sen. André Jacque, R-De Pere, began circulating the bill for sponsorship July 24, two weeks after the UW Board of Regents voted to raise tuition for the third consecutive year.
“Two hundred million dollars is not a lot of money when you have billions at stake, and any corporate person will tell you that,” said Donna E. Shalala, who was health secretary under President Bill Clinton and has led four schools, including the University of Miami and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Basically, they’re cutting their losses and ensuring their future — for at least a short period of time.”
Earlier this month, the Universities of Wisconsin system Board of Regents approved a 5 percent tuition increase for undergraduate students for the 2025-26 academic year.
Legislative Republicans are now trying for a third time to cap tuition increases at the state’s public university system at no higher than the rate of inflation.
The proposal would limit the Board of Regents to “only increase tuition and fees for resident undergraduate students up to the rate of the Consumer Price Index.”
The conservative outlet Wisconsin Right Now reported that there are 495 staffers in Wisconsin’s university system who have the visa, which comes with roughly a $43 million annual price tag for salaries.
The education department drew attention to the University of Wisconsin’s Dreamer scholarship and Western Michigan University’s WMU Undocumented/DACA Scholarship.
Kay Jarvis, director of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, responded to Wednesday’s announcement, saying, “The university has received a letter of notification relating to this matter. We have no further comment.” CBS Detroit has reached out to Western Michigan University for comment and is awaiting a response.
Last week, the same department announced it was launching a separate investigation into the University of Wisconsin following the arrests of Chinese nationals in a number of pathogen smuggling cases.
The team’s strong performance “stemmed a lot from us being fearful of her and if we had done bad, and also the culture that was created at practice, which honestly was a pretty high-anxiety culture,” Badgers runner Victoria Heiligenthal said. “I think it motivated people but obviously from a bad place of motivation.”
On the same day in January 2022 that Mackenzie Wartenberger told her runners that she was resigning for family reasons, the University of Wisconsin sang the praises of the women’s cross country coach in a tweet.
Some members of that team said they couldn’t believe their coach was being celebrated. Five women who ran for Wartenberger told the Wisconsin State Journal in interviews that they experienced mental abuse and a toxic culture on her team. One former runner, Brogan MacDougall, and her mother reported the abuse to athletics officials and the academic side of the university.
Written by Jordan Ellenberg, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wisconsin’s new workload requirement for the Universities of Wisconsin, intended to get faculty teaching more, is a misguided one-size-fits-all approach that, in practice, will cause a host of problems, faculty representatives argue.
Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says this analysis shows why so many researchers “feel completely burnt out by the time they get to tenure”. A focus on metrics, such as number of publications or citation count, doesn’t emphasize quality, innovation or longer projects, she adds. “There’s a great deal of pressure on junior academics to do as much research as possible, to prove you deserve to keep that job.”
There are few guardrails limiting how far oversight boards can change public institutions, said Isabel McMullen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin who researches higher education.
“For a board that really does want to wreak havoc on an institution and overthrow a bunch of different programs, I think if a board is interested in doing that, I don’t really see what’s stopping them aside from students and faculty really organizing against it,” McMullen said.
Luis Hernandez, strategic communications director and associate athletic director for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said the school has come up with other ways to fund its $198.9 million athletics budget, including new corporate sponsorships, such as adding the Culver’s logo to the Kohl’s Center basketball court.
They’ve also scheduled events like concerts and the chance to play indoor golf at Camp Randall Stadium. The upcoming Morgan Wallen and Coldplay concerts at the stadium are the first to be held there in nearly 28 years, Hernandez said.
UW students don’t pay athletic fees, and the university plans on spending the full $20.5 million on athletes that is allowed, he said.
With Fox and five other two-year UW campuses shuttered in recent years, local educators worry that students in rural parts of the state will miss out on educational opportunities without a campus in their community.
Wisconsin’s slate this season and the team’s lack of success under Fickell has many in the media questioning if the Badgers can climb back into contention in the new Big Ten. Reporters from across the Big Ten and national outlets voted Wisconsin to finish 12th in the conference in the Cleveland.com preseason poll.
In the Trump era, with university research on the chopping block, some professors have become part-time fundraisers for the sake of science.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors Anne Bonds and Derek Handley need at least $30,000 to finish their project after the National Endowment for the Humanities cut their grant this spring. They said the agency offered no specific reason for terminating the grant aside from it no longer aligning with funding priorities.
“Things are a mess, and it feels like a lot of unnecessary changes have been made to hinder science,” said David Rivera-Kohr who will defend his biochemistry PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison later this year. “It takes a toll mentally, but it also makes my principal investigator and lab group more conservative about our spending. We don’t know how long the money is going to last or whether new funding will come in, so we’re trying to cut costs.”
A federal appeals court sided with a woman who accused a former Badger football star of sexual assault, overturning a lower court’s dismissal of her lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wisconsin men’s basketball’s 2025-26 non-conference schedule is official — and includes some familiar faces.
High-major opponents on the schedule include BYU on Nov. 21 in Salt Lake City, Marquette on Dec. 6 at the Kohl Center and Villanova on Dec. 19 at Fiserv Forum, along with two teams from the 2025 Rady’s Children Invitational. The tournament, taking place on Nov. 27-28 in San Diego, also includes Florida, Providence and TCU.
Slower processing of financial aid
The agency distributes federal financial aid to students through universities and colleges. University of Wisconsin System students, for example, received about $720 million in federal financial aid last school year, the bulk of which was delivered through the Education Department.
In 1873, just before becoming a student at the University of Wisconsin, La Follette heard Edward Ryan, soon to become the state’s Chief Justice, give a commencement speech. Ryan bluntly defined the central questions of the coming era: “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” This question would animate La Follette’s career as he tried to live up to UW president John Bascom’s insistence that students accept the obligations of citizenship and their duty to serve the state.
Former University of Wisconsin football player Nate White died last month after “a medical event that disrupted his breathing and heart functions,” according to a news release from police in Brookings, South Dakota.
Andrew Reschovsky, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates Madison schools will receive about $9.6 million more in special education aid over the next two years. But he said without increases to general aid or equalization aid — other major forms of state funding for schools — Madison must rely more heavily on local taxes for funding.
“Even though special education aid has been increased, it’s still a relatively small part of total state aid,” he said. “At the state level, state aid all together is less than half of total money needed, or total revenues, to support K-12 education.”
A federal appeals court has reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a woman’s lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin-Madison over how it reinstated a Badgers football star after he had been expelled for sexual assault.
“Due to ongoing litigation, SAVE borrowers do not yet know when their administrative forbearance will end and payments will resume,” said Nicholas Hillman, director of the Student Success Through Applied Research (SSTAR) Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “All they can be certain of is their interest will now start to accrue, and that’s cold comfort for borrowers who have—for no fault of their own—been stuck in administrative forbearance.”
Students from rural communities and small towns can bring a rich set of strengths and perspectives to college — from leadership experience and resourcefulness to a deep sense of community — but they may also face unique logistical and cultural challenges. Not only do such barriers impact individual students, but they also affect college attendance rates.
The Lifelong Learner is a monthly feature written by UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies staff, including this week’s feature written by Christine Cina, academic advising manager.
The cost of tuition will go up by hundreds of dollars at Universities of Wisconsin schools under a plan passed by UW leaders on Thursday.
Leaders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are reorganizing certain programs, offices and divisions to offer new services to students while dissolving its division focused on diversity and equity, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announced Wednesday.
The Board of Regents for the Universities of Wisconsin unanimously approved a tuition increase of up to 5 percent for the 2025-26 academic year.
In-state students will pay a higher tuition rate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a third consecutive year.
On Thursday, the UW system’s Board of Regents voted unanimously to increase tuition across Wisconsin’s 13 public universities next school year. Each school will increase resident undergraduate rates by 4%. All of the universities, except UW-Green Bay, also opted in to an additional 1%.
Tyler Jake and Deanna Frater are the president and vice president of UW-Madison’s Black Student Union. As they get ready to head back to campus for their senior year, they’re surprised they got no warning that DDEEA is closing.
“I feel like we’re students that are pretty engaged with the administration, and usually we would be made aware of things like this beforehand,” Frater said. “No one really said anything to us.”
“UW has always prided themselves on diversity—or at least that’s something we try to preach—and it’s just really disappointing,” said Asha Eckelberg, a UW–Madison student.
