For state colleges, modest budget cuts are balanced by valuable autonomy.
By now, you’ve likely heard of the beleaguered University of Wisconsin Ph.D. student who took to the pages of the Washington Post to decry Governor Scott Walker’s “starving” of the state-university system. Michael Mirer says the UW system is “barely scraping by” because he was unable to make a free long-distance call from his department-issued speakerphone. As The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes ably pointed out, Mirer had any number of alternative options from which to choose, given that long-distance calling via land line is something The Wire’s Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale figured out how to avoid a decade ago.
Nonetheless, Walker is still subjected to charges that he is “gutting” the UW system, leading to a lower quality of life in the state. Walker perhaps contributed to this idea when his budget office attempted to rewrite the university’s statutory mission statement, omitting, for instance, the idea that “basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” (Walker quickly backtracked on the change, calling it a “drafting error.”)
But that brief dust-up obscured the real fight going on between Walker and the university. In his recently introduced budget, Walker cuts state aid to the university by $150 million, then freezes that funding level for a second year (which is why it is often characterized as a “$300 million cut,” even though the university doesn’t really need to cut anything the second year; it simply must make do with the prior year’s allotment).
However, an important component of Walker’s budget plan is that the university system will get operational flexibility to make up for those cuts in the future. For instance, in theory, the university has the ability to set its own tuition, but the legislature rarely grants it that authority. Walker’s plan would give the system that autonomy in the future, as well as the ability to negotiate its own employee contracts and bond for its own buildings. This is similar to the operational flexibility that Virginia granted to its universities nearly a decade ago.
So while the university’s budget would go down slightly, in the short term it would have the ability to manage those cuts the way it saw fit, and in the long term it would be able to make up for them via tuition increases.
Further, a long-term look at the University of Wisconsin system shows a university that isn’t exactly emaciated. Here’s a chart that shows the two major components of university funding — state aid and tuition — since 2000. The last two years (2016 and 2017) represent Walker’s proposal.
Even with Walker’s reductions, the university’s two largest funding sources have increased by 64 percent since 2000. The system also receives federal aid, gifts and grants, and other revenues, but these tend to have strings attached, so it’s not entirely fair for them to be counted in the university’s budget. If they were, though, the increase in revenues would be even greater.
It also didn’t particularly help UW’s case when legislators found the system had been sitting on nearly $1 billion in reserves, stashed away for a rainy day. Perhaps Walker’s budget will provoke them to pull out their umbrellas.
— Christian Schneider is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.