“The idea is that the cost to build a new apartment is the same whether its intended for market rate occupancy or affordable occupancy,” said Kurt Paulsen, UW-Madison professor of urban planning. “If you want developers to build affordable units, you need to provide a capital subsidy.”
Evers’ state budget, announced Wednesday night, would increase the University of Wisconsin System’s budget by $305.9 million over the biennium. But even as the state finds itself in an unprecedented financial position, with a projected $7.1 billion surplus, the number is nearly $130 million less than the UW System’s request of $435.6 million, according to figures from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The long-term prospect of a tuition promise program for low-income University of Wisconsin System students is in jeopardy after a top lawmaker said the Republican-controlled Legislature is unlikely to fund it.
Though you may not have heard of it, shared revenue is a financial lifeline for local governments in Wisconsin — and it’s entered the spotlight as communities scramble to fund essential services.
Wisconsin’s state universities would see a significant funding boost under Gov. Tony Evers’ state budget proposal, with a portion of the money helping pay for a tuition waiver program aimed at students from lower income households. But if past budget battles with the Republican-controlled state Legislature are any guide, the final number for the system is unlikely to match the governor’s wishes.
Gov. Tony Evers’ budget leaves the University of Wisconsin System about $130 million short of what regents say they need to run their campuses over the next two years, raising questions about whether they may raise tuition to make up the shortfall.
The Democratic governor on Wednesday proposed a $305 million increase for University of Wisconsin System campuses over the next two fiscal years. That’s less than the $435 million UW System asked for, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Even so, top UW leaders praised the proposal, saying it would help schools educate the state’s future workforce.
Most public- and private-sector workers in Wisconsin would be eligible for 12 weeks of paid family leave under Gov. Tony Evers’ two-year spending plan, which also includes tax cuts for low- and middle-income residents and increased spending on public schools.
Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed 2023-25 budget would provide the University of Wisconsin System with a boost that still falls short of what it sought as it grapples with rising costs.
The budget would attempt to address the state’s teaching shortage through investments in “grow your own” programs that allow current staff to pursue additional higher education credits or licenses, or cover college costs for students who commit to teaching in their district of attendance after graduation. It would also provide stipends to student teachers and interns and those who agree to train and oversee them.
The spending plan also would: Require state technical colleges and University of Wisconsin System schools to ensure they issue IDs that are valid for voting purposes.
UW-Madison will aggressively seek a new College of Engineering building as its top priority in the upcoming state budget cycle as growth stagnates and faculty compete with one another for coveted and increasingly limited lab space.
The Bucky’s Pell Pathway program, introduced on Thursday, will meet full financial needs for four years for new first-year Wisconsin residents students who quality for Pell Grants. Transfer students can also take advantage of the program and receive funding for two years if they meet the same criteria.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is expanding its tuition promise program to cover not only tuition for some low-income students, but nearly all other college costs that can derail progress toward a degree, such as room and board.
The program, which Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin introduced Thursday to the Board of Regents, will meet the full financial need for those who qualify for Pell grants. Those federal dollars are limited to undergraduates with exceptional financial need but often don’t cover the full cost of school, causing many recipients to take out extra loans.
The goal of the program, called Bucky’s Pell Pathway, is to help alleviate the disadvantages students from low-income families frequently face. The assistance is only available to in-state students, and no state funds are used for either the Pell Pathway or the Tuition Promise program.
Proposal includes $2.8 million over the biennium to University of Wisconsin System campuses to provide services tailored to veterans, military personnel and their families.
While the difference was offset in some years with aid that did not apply to the revenue limit, public school advocate and former University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education dean Julie Underwood said numbers like that justify a major increase in budgets ahead.
She characterized the state of education funding in Wisconsin as “really abysmal,” suggesting that the state is “so far behind” where it should be given the increasing costs of the past decade. “We need a ladder up to where we should have been,” Underwood said.
In the first State of the State address of his second term, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday proposed boosting mental health spending and increasing funding for public education and local governments — proposals that may see some support from the Republican-controlled Legislature, depending on the price tag.
The WPF analysis also noted that funding budget requests from the UW System and the Wisconsin Technical College System would cost about $377 million. Increasing general K-12 school aids by 1% in each year of the budget would cost about $157 million, and increasing shared revenue to local governments by 1% in each year would cost about $25 million.
Dear Editor: Wisconsin’s projected surplus of $6.5 billion is an opportunity to realize Wisconsin values.
The University of Wisconsin is also valued by citizens. The surplus must support at least an inflationary budget increase, offsetting a continued freeze in undergraduate tuition. The UW educates thousands, supports businesses and farmers statewide, and its research and knowledgeable graduates are valuable to businesses.
Evers has also voiced support for raising K-12 education funding by nearly $2 billion and increasing spending on the University of Wisconsin System.
Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services announced a $16 million, statewide investment Wednesday to improve maternal and infant health, especially among people of color.
The funding, largely made possible through the American Rescue Plan Act, will be split between the state health department’s Maternal and Child Health program, the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Healthier Wisconsin Endowment and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Each entity will receive $5.5 million.
The MCW endowment fund and UW-Madison will use the funding to also support community grants for programs that focus on the social conditions that contribute to racial disparities in Wisconsin’s maternal and infant mortality rates.
Quoted: Julie Underwood, former chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, served on the Blue Ribbon Commission and is currently pushing for 90% coverage, in her role as president of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools.
“It is a federal mandate to educate all children with disabilities; we have to provide them a free appropriate public education, as we should,” Underwood said. “But when the state stepped back from funding that more and more, it became more and more expensive for local school districts to make good on that promise.”
This week, UW System President Jay Rothman announced the Wisconsin Tuition Promise, a new initiative to ensure underserved Wisconsin students can attend any university in the system tuition-free.
Under the new Wisconsin Tuition Promise starting next fall, in-state students from low income families will be able to attend any school in the University of Wisconsin System for free.
The program, announced this week, will waive the costs of tuition and fees that remain after receiving financial aid for UW System students whose household incomes are less than $62,000 per year.
The University of Wisconsin System is seeking $262.6 million in additional state funding in its two-year budget request and plans to use the bulk of that to boost employee pay by 8 percent by 2025. Regents passed the proposal unanimously even as some expressed concern that it could be a tough sell with Republican state lawmakers who increased the system’s base funding by $16.6 million last year.
Some University of Wisconsin-System students from low-income families will have their tuition and fees waived under a new initiative announced by UW System President Jay Rothman.
The Wisconsin Tuition Promise will waive remaining costs not covered by financial aid for students from families with incomes below $62,000 per year beginning in fall of 2023.
At a Monday news conference on the UW-Milwaukee campus, UW officials framed the scholarship program as a “gamechanger” that will help more students graduate and ease the workforce shortage straining the state.
“We are in a war for talent,” UW System President Jay Rothman said. “We are not graduating enough people with four-year degrees and graduate degrees in order to help sustain the economic growth of the state. We hear that from employers all the time.”
In an interview before her departure to become president of Northwestern University this fall, Blank took aim at state regulations that prevent the UW System’s flagship campus from issuing its own bonds for new buildings and which add time and expense to routine maintenance.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents Thursday approved a budget that keeps an in-state undergraduate tuition freeze in place for another year.
Wisconsin residents will not pay any more next year to attend the state’s universities. The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved a tuition freeze for in-state undergraduate students Thursday as part of the 2022-23 operating budget.
Newly appointed University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman plans to recommend a tuition freeze in the upcoming school year for in-state undergraduate students when he presents the Board of Regents with the System’s annual budget next week.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has included provisions in both of his state budget proposals to allow Wisconsinites who entered the country illegally to obtain driver’s licenses and identification cards, and to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition to attend college in Wisconsin. Republican lawmakers stripped those provisions from the budget in both cases.
The conversation at the Discovery Building — moderated by Cap Times Capitol bureau chief Jessie Opoien — included state Sen. Kelda Roys, Sen. Joan Ballweg, regent Amy Bogost and UW-Madison economics professor Ananth Seshadri.
In the last decade, total state financial aid to Wisconsin’s college students has declined, causing the state to fall further behind other states in financial aid levels, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Wisconsin’s financial aid funding hasn’t kept pace with inflation or the rising cost of college over the past decade, a new report found, raising questions about the state’s ability to enroll and graduate enough students to meet long-term workforce needs.
UW-Madison will receive $1 million to begin advanced planning and design work for a new engineering building under a measure Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed into law Friday.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced Tuesday during his State of the State address that he was extending the University of Wisconsin’s long-running tuition freeze for another year.
Evers, who is seeking a second term this November, also touted the billions of dollars of federal stimulus funds he has allocated over the course of the pandemic to businesses and farmers. Adding to that, he announced on Tuesday plans to spend $25 million of those funds to freeze tuition at University of Wisconsin System for two years and another $5 million to expand counseling and provide mental health programs for members of the Wisconsin National Guard.
Evers also announced that he was tapping $25 million in federal pandemic relief money to pay for continuing a tuition freeze at the University of Wisconsin System for another year. The Legislature lifted the tuition freeze for this year, but the UW Board of Regents opted not to raise tuition. Evers is providing funding to pay for the current freeze and another year, the 2022-2023 school year.
Evers, who is the 46th Wisconsin Governor, gave his State of the State address at the Feb. 15 joint convention of the Wisconsin Legislature. In his address, Evers announced plans to address rising gas prices, a struggling job market and supply shortages. While Wisconsin families have faced much of the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, Evers said he wanted to account for students in higher education who have been under considerable stress throughout the pandemic.
The contracts, which passed the state Assembly and Senate last month, cover the previous and current fiscal year and amount to raises ranging from 1.23% to 1.8%. Similar raises were approved for UW-Madison and University of Wisconsin System tradespeople.
In her farewell address to the UW Board of Regents Thursday, Rebecca Blank also took aim at state involvement in campus building projects, criticized some “one-size-fits-all” University of Wisconsin System policies and again called for raising in-state undergraduate tuition.
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economist with the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is skeptical of the idea that federal pandemic relief spending is the primary cause of recent inflation.
“It’s certainly part of the explanation – but other economies (UK, Euro Area) have also seen an acceleration of inflation,” Chinn says, with higher oil prices, continued supply disruptions and other factors being the main contributors. “One could argue that part of the inflation is due to too little spending, say, on childcare support, which would enable parents to work.”
Mark Copelovitch, a La Follette School political scientist whose work looks at the intersection of economics and politics, says that the ability of the U.S. to finance its debt at virtually no interest shows that the marketplace — essentially, the world’s lenders — isn’t worried about the sustainability of the economy.
On inflation, he considers shortages such as in semiconductors, a key component of cars, or the spike in energy prices, not pandemic relief aid, as leading culprits for rising prices. “Most of what’s driving the inflation is global supply chain issues during a pandemic,” Copelovitch says.
He credits pandemic relief, in the form of direct aid to households as well as other forms of support as well as directly to the state, for preserving incomes, keeping businesses going in the pandemic, and enabling the economy to recover much more quickly than it might have otherwise.
“The reason we have this big surplus now in Wisconsin and elsewhere is because all the other things basically prevented people’s incomes from going down — which meant tax revenue didn’t crater like we worried it was going to,” Copelovitch says.
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.
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.
“(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.”
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.
The state Legislative Audit Bureau released its annual financial audit of the University of Wisconsin System Tuesday.
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.
Quoted: The Journal Sentinel’s findings that tax dollars are going to landlords who fail to fix potentially dangerous electrical violations are “shocking and terrible,” said Mitch, a housing law expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who legally goes by just his first name.
“It would be as if a health inspector found rats at a restaurant and said, ‘Here’s a whole bunch of government coupons that you can use to give out and make your food less expensive — never mind the rats,’” he said.
Mitch, who oversees the UW-Madison Neighborhood Law Clinic, which primarily serves low-income renters, said it’s possible to hold landlords accountable while still protecting tenants.
“We can have safe cars, and people still buy cars,” he said. “We can have regulations on restaurants, and we still have restaurants. We have regulations on banking, and we still have banks. Every industry has regulations, and it still survives.”
Seven facilities on the UW-Madison will receive an upgrade, including in elevators that range in age from 45-56 years old and do not meet current accessibility standards.
After months of grim financial forecasts, University of Wisconsin System leaders presented a much rosier financial outlook this week as campuses settle into another school year shadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Wisconsin state budget is an excruciatingly complicated document that takes your state and federal tax dollars and spends them on programs like food assistance for poor residents, projects like county highway repairs and public employees like school teachers.
This August, faculty, staff, and more than 160,000 students at the 13 University of Wisconsin campuses are hard at work, getting ready for a new academic year. Wisconsinites are justifiably proud of the UW System, and with good reason. Our public university system, built on the foundation of the Wisconsin Idea, truly serves every corner of the state.
Noted: The governor said the session would be an opportunity to make investments in education he believes should have been included in the budget. GOP lawmakers approved an education spending plan that was roughly $750 million less than the governor originally requested for K-12 schools. For the University of Wisconsin System, the GOP-backed budget included an increase of just $8 million over two years, a fraction of the $191 million proposed by the governor.
In his special session call, Evers urged lawmakers to take up a proposal that would allocate an additional $440 million for K-12 schools ($240 million in per-pupil aid and $200 million in special education aid) and an additional $110 million for the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical Colleges System.
Quoted: “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I have no idea why he did that,” said John Witte, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus who specializes in tax and budget policy.
Witte said there is speculation that Evers vetoed the change in the withholding tables because the governor hopes Democrats will take control of the Legislature in the 2022 election and repeal the tax cuts. By not changing the withholding tables, most taxpayers wouldn’t notice a difference, that thinking goes.
“If he changed the tables the tax cuts would be permanent,” said Witte.
