More than 70 percent of Wisconsin college students who enrolled in 2015 graduated within six years, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The state outperformed national averages in all institutional categories, but significant graduation rate gaps still exist between racial groups.
There are plenty of indicators that farmers across the country are starting 2022 in a strong financial position, said Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
An effort to expand higher education offerings for state prison inmates is taking shape under interim University of Wisconsin President Tommy Thompson, who oversaw the largest expansion of prisons in the state’s history during his 14 years as governor.
Quoted: Those changes can already be seen clearly by examining lake ice, said Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
Scientists studying Wisconsin’s inland lakes are able to collect a wealth of information on Madison’s lakes Mendota and Monona, whose ice records stretch back close to 170 years. Lakes have ice cover for about a month less now than they did when the records began, researchers estimate.
Out of Lake Mendota’s long ice record, the five years with the longest stretch of ice cover all occurred during the 1880s or earlier, and the five years with the shortest ice cover have all been since the 1980s, Vavrus said. It “really is a very different winter climate that we’re living in nowadays compared to over a century ago,” he said.
“I think what we’re seeing is people are pushing in at the limits of the edges of the season where it is potentially more dangerous,” said Titus Seilheimer, fisheries outreach specialist for the Wisconsin Sea Grant.
More than 13,000 Afghan refugees landed in Wisconsin at Fort McCoy near Tomah in August 2021 and are now being resettled across the state and nation. Not only did they face trauma in being airlifted suddenly from Kabul, but continue to face uncertainty about their futures, including the legal process for obtaining legal immigration status in the U.S. that’s described as complex.
“A lot of people specifically with this situation were hoping there would be something called an Afghan Adjustment Act,” says Erin Barbato, director of the University of Wisconsin Law School Immigrant Justice Clinic. “We’ve had before it with the Cuban Adjustment Act, which would allow everybody who came in this emergent situation to have an expedited manner to obtain their lawful permanent resident status and then have a pathway to citizenship. But so far, it doesn’t seem like there has been much movement in our Congress to make this happen.”
Quoted: UW politics professor Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center, says, “Really in modern times, we’ve seen nothing like what has happened in Wisconsin, and nationally, since the 2020 election.”
He continues, “The unwillingness of most of one party to accept the results and to continue pushing with audits and investigations and questions and subpoenas and other efforts to try to keep their concerns alive, is really new and doesn’t have any precedent. And I think it is not well supported by the facts of the election.”
A two-year push to make college education more accessible to Wisconsin inmates has gained momentum with nearly $6 million in public and private grants.
The funding will help matriculate inmates and “break the back of recidivism,” Tommy Thompson, University of Wisconsin System interim president and former governor, said.
Thompson first announced his Prison Education Initiative in December 2020. The pitch was simple: build UW System degree programs at state prisons and ultimately turn one into an “educational institution.”
A subvariant of omicron that could spread more rapidly than the original omicron has been detected in Wisconsin.
A case of the subvariant, known as BA.2, was detected the week of Jan. 16 in Wisconsin, according to an online dashboard maintained by the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The details are fuzzy, but Tommy Thompson’s idea to “turn a prison into a university” is starting to take shape. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. late last year awarded the University of Wisconsin System and the Department of Corrections a $5.7 million grant to expand college pathways for inmates. The grant provides a much-needed boost for the project, which Republicans declined to fund in the state budget passed last summer.
Noted: Statewide, 69 percent of people are aware that global warming is happening, according to a 2020 University of Wisconsin-Madison report which said people are “eager” to hear from health professionals.
People from outside Wisconsin would qualify for in-state tuition at University of Wisconsin System schools under a new Republican bill, so long as their parents are UW alumni. Authors say the bill would address declining enrollment at state schools and address workforce shortages, while opponents say it would cut college funding and raise fairness issues.
Noted: In addition, Evers would provide $611 million for K-12 education, $111 million for the University of Wisconsin System and $28 million for the state’s technical colleges.
Quoted: “Everything we do alters the selective pressures on the virus,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you wear a mask, then it pays for the virus to sit and wait. If you go to big parties and don’t wear a mask, it will favor viruses that are more aggressive, and that make you sicker so that they can move into new people faster.”
“The virus is like a horror movie villain,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. “Every time you think it is dead, it comes back.”
Noted: “The pandemic exacerbated a long-term trend,” said Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Population Health Sciences, on WPR’s “Central Time.”
Alcohol is pervasive in Wisconsin culture. A 2019 report called “The Burden of Binge Drinking in Wisconsin” from the UW-Madison Population Health Institute found the state’s rate of binge drinking to be higher than the U.S. overall.
Quoted: “He’s been I would say argumentative and somewhat belligerent,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s a little bit of a sort of bull in the china shop analogy, that he’s just throwing elbows and feels, it seems, quite confident about what he’s doing. … I can’t diagnose him psychologically from a distance. I wouldn’t want to do that. But there is a pattern of him being brazen I would say and aggressive in his actions without maybe thinking about all the consequences of what he’s doing.”
Noted: A 2020 report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Policy prepared for the League of Wisconsin Municipalities shows that between 2006 and 2018, 108 local governments went to referendum and 65 percent failed on election day.
Quoted: While other states brag big dairy and crop industries, Wisconsin’s insulation from fertilizer price spikes is thanks to having more cows per acre than corn per acre, according to Paul Mitchell, a professor in the UW-Madison department for Agriculture and Applied Economics.
“About a third of our nitrogen for corn comes from dairy manure,” Mitchell said. “And we have more cows per acre of cropland.”
However, manure isn’t easily accessible. It’s difficult to transport due to its high water content and therefore large volume, so it can’t usually go beyond it’s own farmland or crop farms neighboring dairy farms.
But it’s lack of transport ability shouldn’t dissuade you from seeking it out, according to Matt Ruark, a professor of soil science at UW-Madison and soil nutrient expert.
“We think of [manure] as a waste stream, but it is has relatively high nutrient value in terms of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Those are big three nutrient inputs into our corn production systems,” Ruark said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW System also negotiated deals with the committee calling for the same raises for their tradespeople.
Here’s what guests on the Jan. 21, 2022 episode had to say about returning UW-Madison students in the midst of the Omicron surge, whether it has yet to peak in Wisconsin, medical ethics involved in treating COVID-19 patients and why the state figures so prominently in the national politics of election practices.
We talk with Greenville Rep. David Murphy on UW systems free speech policy and the state of a new system president. Then, the Wisconsin Supplier Diversity Program director talks about how to increase diversity in the state’s business contracts.
Quoted: Victoria Solomon is a community development educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in Green County. She has studied women’s participation in local elected office and what barriers keep more women from running.
Solomon said one of the biggest factors affecting the number of women running for office is the fact that women are less likely to be asked to run for office.
“Having people who are thinking about who to ask to consider running for office, having those people think about starting with strengths and perspectives and experiences, and looking at diversity amongst those,” Solomon said. “We know that having diverse voices at the table helps build better decisions.”
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy professor James Lattis said the southwest direction of the object means it was likely a meteoroid and not a piece of space junk, which generally travels east.
He said it’s common to see meteors in the early morning hours in the Midwest because the region is facing forward in the earth’s obit around the sun.
“It’s like looking out the windshield of your car,” he said. “You get more bugs on your windshield because that’s the direction you’re moving.”
A Senate committee passed seven bills Wednesday related to the state colleges, including two that would expand eligibility for in-state tuition and three that are aimed at preventing foreign influence in higher education.
The only bill to pass the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges with unanimous support was Senate Bill 557, which expands the ability of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and the UW System to invest certain revenues.
A new poll of Wisconsin residents shows that climate change, the federal budget deficit, income distribution and race relations are among the top concerns heading into the 2022 midterms, although many of the same respondents felt issues were a larger problem at the national level.
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs sent an eight-page survey to 5,000 residents between July and September 2020. Nearly 1,600 individuals from all over the state except Menomonee County responded, with a response rate of 33 percent.
Quoted: According to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, Wisconsin’s average winter temperature rose about 2 to 6 degrees between 1950 and 2018, depending on the part of the state. And in the coming years, those temperatures could rise another 6 degrees, greatly impacting the amount of snow the state sees, and the areas where snow is present for the entire winter season.
But what is really impacting the hares isn’t the amount of snow falling in Wisconsin — that has largely stayed the same, said Michael Notaro, the associate director for the Nelson Institute. It’s the amount of snowpack, or snow on the ground, that is impacting animals.
As the Earth’s temperature increases, snow melts quicker, meaning the snow season doesn’t last as long.
“In the future, as it keeps getting warmer, eventually (precipitation) is going to be more in the form of a liquid, but so far that hasn’t necessarily occurred, but (snow) is just not staying on the ground very long,” Notaro said.
Quoted: “We’re likely to see more infections, and those breakthrough infections can be quite serious,” said Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program. “I think any place where outbreaks are likely to happen – and certainly long-term care facilities are places where that can happen – we should be concerned.”
Quoted: “Correlation does not mean causation,” said Timothy Smeeding, professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In other words, if two variables run parallel historically, it doesn’t mean the one is causing the other.
A number of factors have contributed to the rise in out-of-wedlock births, he said.
There has been a rise in cohabitation, more permissive sexual mores, a decline in shotgun weddings, easier divorce laws, a drop in manufacturing jobs for males without college degrees and greater financial independence for women.
The three largest University of Wisconsin System campuses are reporting spikes in positive cases of COVID-19 weeks before the start of spring semester classes. While some of the state’s smaller, private colleges push start dates back, UW campuses say they’re starting on time and in-person.
A bill aimed at punishing colleges and universities for violating free speech and academic freedom rules set by Republicans has passed a legislative committee by a party-line vote. This comes after a GOP author amended the legislation to remove provisions that were potentially unconstitutional.
The UW–Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs’ inaugural La Follette Policy Poll was conducted between July and September 2021 among almost 1,600 Wisconsin residents from all but one county. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.5 percentage points.
Quoted: “If the GOP primary becomes a three-way race, it will likely quickly become one of the most costly in the country,” said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center.
“The funding will need to emerge quickly because the primary is only seven months away and two of the prime candidates have not even officially entered the race.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics says in its latest report that COVID-19 cases among children have reached the highest case count ever reported since the start of the pandemic — and hospitalizations are rising across the country.
In Wisconsin, 13 pediatric patients on average are being admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 every day, according to federal data for the week ending Jan. 5. That’s a 71 percent increase from the previous week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That number is concerning to UW Health pediatrician Dr. James Conway.
“You know we’re certainly seeing more hospitalizations in adults. But kids, we’re still worried that we’re actually on the front end of the curve,” Conway said.
Written by Susan Webb Yackee is director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Collins-Bascom professor of public affairs and political science at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained that “viruses like SARS-CoV-2 evolve as they replicate in a person with infection and as they spread from one person to the next. When that evolutionary process yields a strain that has a genetic make-up which is very different from the original virus, it is considered a ‘variant.’ ”
He added that “a virus is a ‘variant of concern’ if it has the potential to threaten the pandemic response in some way. It may be more infectious than other variants, cause more severe illness, not be detectable by current tests, less affected by current treatments, partially escape immunity provided by current vaccines, or a combination of these.”
A series of bills with bipartisan support could give the University of Wisconsin System a new sustainable source of money that is nearly three times more than what campuses received in funding increases in the most recent state budget.
And while Evers’ seven unconfirmed appointees to the UW Board of Regents have been serving without the Senate’s stamp of approval, the Republican lawmaker chairing the committee charged with confirming them recently warned that some may be in trouble.
Some private colleges and universities in Wisconsin are delaying the start of spring semester classes, requiring negative COVID-19 tests or vaccinations and boosters for students and employees amid a rapid surge of new COVID-19 infections. At the same time, the University of Wisconsin System says students “will return on-time and as normal” for classes starting this month.
Quoted: “This current increase is being fueled by the new omicron variant, which is more infectious than delta” — until recently, the predominant variant of the virus in Wisconsin, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and faculty director of the master’s degree in public health program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “This has gotten worse, not better,” said Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication whose research focuses on the functioning of American democracy. “I think we had a moment a year ago to try to push the reset button on how we think about democratic elections, and instead, we kept playing.”
“It’s made it convenient for people who want to doubt the election to cling to that — and that was part of what motivated the insurrectionists,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison.
A new program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will give youth in three Wisconsin counties the chance to work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension to explore post-high school educational and work opportunities.
“(Evers) has resources to do things that I think were not expected and are available without him having to raise taxes to make it possible,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The fact that he is basically in sole control of distributing the federal COVID relief funds means that he’s satisfying a lot of different constituencies heading into the 2022 midterm elections without paying the price of being branded as a liberal Democrat who has raised taxes to make that happen.”
Noted: Bubolz, Christenson, 87, and Falk, 70, each earned law degrees at the University of Wisconsin but took different paths to affect conservation in the state.
Valentin Picasso, an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said researchers in his field have known for a long time that planting perennial crops in farm fields has a long list of environmental benefits.
The plants’ year-round presence protects the soil from erosion and helps absorb nutrients that would otherwise runoff into lakes and rivers. The forages, which are used for livestock feed, also create an environment for increased biodiversity and can even help fix carbon into the soil, mediating the effects of climate change.
“We’ve shown, in looking at long term research here in Wisconsin, that the more diversity we have in a cropping system, the more resilient it is to weather extremes like drought. And we’ve also shown that the more perennials in the system, we have more stability in production,” Picasso said.
Noted: With a new building, the Burlington Area School District needed a new middle school principal. Nick Ryan’s the man for the job.
Before landing in Burlington, Ryan taught in Oconomowoc and Watertown. After receiving his master’s degree from UW-Madison, he ventured back to his birth state, Wyoming, to serve as an assistant principal before taking a similar job back in Watertown.
Noted: Blumenfeld, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has been involved in the Madison Jewish community for most of her adult life. She is a former president of the Jewish Federation of Madison and served as a board member there for 17 years.
Quoted: At the beginning of the pandemic, the rate of inflation was almost zero and prices were falling, said Dr. Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.
In response, the government passed robust support packages — including stimulus checks, enhances unemployment benefits and tax cuts — to boost spending. The spending those programs created was concentrated more on goods than services, Chinn said.
“We have kind of a weird time where people have shifted more towards buying goods and we get a lot of our goods from China and abroad,” Chinn said. “So that means you have this collision, at least in the goods sector, of enhanced demand and not quite enough supply to keep up. And what happens is prices go up. Supply and demand.”
Wisconsin families may have received their last Child Tax Credit payment for a while, as Congress has missed its year-end deadline to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better framework.
The roughly $2 trillion package would have reauthorized the expanded Child Tax Credit through 2022. Parents received their last credit on Dec. 15, and Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said to get the rest of the aid, they’ll need to file their income tax returns for 2021.
“So, there’s still another $1,500 or $1,800, depending on how old the child is, that will come to them once they file their taxes this next spring,” he said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that running for office is a remedy “as long as it is done in the spirit of genuine public service and not merely to implement a dogmatic agenda.”
He notes: Volunteering on local boards and commissions is “an underappreciated way to contribute and see what good is happening in the public sphere.”
Quoted: In Wisconsin, there were more deaths than births for the first time since the state began keeping vital records, said demographer David Egan-Robertson of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“It’s just been a complete sea change in terms of how we view the population,” Egan-Robertson said.
The University of Wisconsin system will offer healthcare students new incentives for working on COVID-19 front lines.
President Tommy Thompson announced Wednesday that a thousand students will be eligible for a $500 tuition incentive for working in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
Noted: Jeff Sindelar, associate professor in the meat and science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees 100% with the European influence when it comes to Wisconsin’s sausage skills.
It started with people with strong meat-processing skill sets putting down roots here, but having people who wanted to purchase those foods provided a sustainable market throughout the generations.
Wisconsin was also well-positioned geographically to help carry on those traditions, Sindelar said. Being located between the large population centers of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the latter with its famous stockyards, brought railways to Wisconsin.
Noted: Abrams said his organization also is working with the University of Wisconsin System to provide a $500 tuition credit to UW students who work in a health care facility over winter break, which is typically a month in length.
The state Legislative Audit Bureau released its annual financial audit of the University of Wisconsin System Tuesday.
The bipartisan Joint Committee of Employment Relations voted unanimously to approve the pay plan.
A study released by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams says eliminating the personal income tax and raising the sales tax would jump start Wisconsin’s economy.
Noted: Written by Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and faculty co-director of the Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Quoted: The U.S. last experienced rampant inflation four decades ago. “We have very short memories,” says Steven Deller, an economist in the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. “We don’t remember what it was like during the 1970s and early 80s, so this is unusual.”
In a recent analysis, Menzie Chinn, an economist at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, writes that inflation averaged just 1.7% in the last decade, at times “raising concerns that inflation was too low.”
But while the current inflation might have first looked like the economy playing catch-up after prices tumbled early in the pandemic, it has since “overshot the trend,” Chinn adds. Big-ticket purchases — cars, appliances and other so-called durable goods — are showing the sharpest increases, Chinn writes on his blog Econbrowser. High real estate prices and rental costs have also been a factor.
Quoted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said stormy days aren’t that rare of an occurrence at this time of the year for the state.
“Even in a normal year, under perfectly normal circumstances, we’d have a nice progression of pretty stormy days, followed by a couple of clear days, followed by stormy,” he said. “But there are a couple of things that might be fueling a little bit of an extra punch for these things.”
Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, said the amount of time where tornadoes are a risk for the state is only going to grow.
“On the whole, we’re not sure how (tornadoes) are going to change in the future, whether they’re going to become more intense, less intense, more common, less common,” he said. “But in a warmer climate, we’ll start to see conditions more favorable for tornadoes earlier in the year, in April or May, and then becoming more common in the fall through November.”
Quoted: People are quitting their jobs at nearly twice the rate they did before the pandemic. And they’re not in a rush to come back, Michael Childers, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor, said.
“Workers are more selective and have that opportunity right now based on the job market. And that almost becomes self-fulfilling. It’s sort of this sustaining cycle that we’re in,” Childers said at Tuesday’s event.
Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said most of the price increases have been in fresh meat products, with more processed items like hot dogs or lunch meat seeing small price growth or none at all.
But Sindelar said the meat industry is “too dynamic” to clearly point to the factor that is driving up prices.
He said farmers are facing increased costs to raise animals. But price changes are more likely to come from the processing companies, which have a greater influence on what consumers pay for products. Sindelar travels the state to work with all sizes of meat processors, and he said they’re seeing higher production costs, too.
“Regardless of where I go, I get the same response: they can’t hire enough people, they have open positions. When they’re trying to produce products, it’s taking them seven days to produce five days worth of product,” Sindelar said. “So 20 to 25 percent more resources to produce the same amount of product as they once did.”
Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison’s director of dairy policy analysis, said mixed market signals for dairy farmers could be keeping prices from increasing as rapidly as other food groups.
“Our future markets are showing that we would expect higher (commodity) prices over the next several months. But we’ve also had a few reports that are kind of pulling back on those reigns a little bit. One of them are the stocks reports,” Stephenson said.
