UW-Madison’s Sébastien Philippe is an expert in modeling nuclear war. He’s now working with the United Nations to research and reduce the risk of that happening, but he told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that an arms race may already be underway.
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After a transformational 15 years as head coach of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls football team, Matt Walker is leaving for Drake University.
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"Wisconsin Today" spoke with the directors of two higher education child care centers about the needs of student-parents and the challenges they face when it comes to seeking child care and education.
The post Wisconsin’s campus child care facilities offer parents foothold in higher education appeared first on WPR.
Marquette was one of 41 colleges named in a recent report that alleges the schools encourage low-income families to take out Parent PLUS loans while they at the same time offer financial aid to upper-income students.
The post Marquette University accused of pushing lower-income families toward risky loans appeared first on WPR.
Michael Clayville and Erin Lesser of Appleton attended the ceremony in LA, where their group Alarm Will Sound won for their recording of Donnacha Dennehy’s “Land of Winter.”
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UW-Milwaukee is consolidating several student cultural and resource centers into a new “unified, student-focused hub.” That's leaving some students worried about access.
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The entrance to the Wisconsin Assembly chambers. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
The Wisconsin Assembly advanced proposals that would restrict executive rulemaking powers and eliminate “race-based” programs in higher education Thursday.
Wisconsin Republicans have been looking for ways to limit agencies’ administrative rulemaking abilities and exercise additional control over the process in the aftermath of several state Supreme Court rulings.
One of those rulings, the Evers v. Marklein II decision issued on July 8, 2025, found unconstitutional statutes that allowed the 10-member Joint Committee on the Review of Administrative Rules’ to review and suspend administrative rules.
AJR 133 would allow state lawmakers to suspend indefinitely or temporarily administrative rules that are promulgated by state agencies with a vote of the full Senate and Assembly. The proposal passed 52-45 along party lines.
“No body of our state government is more accountable to the people of our state than the Legislature, and these bills will restore our ability to represent our constituents and provide them with the regulatory accountability and predictability they need to prosper,” Rep. Brent Jacobson (R-Mosinee) said during the floor debate.
Constitutional amendment proposals must pass two consecutive sessions of the Legislature and be approved by a majority of voters before becoming law. This is the proposal’s first consideration. It still needs to pass the Senate to advance to a second consideration.
The Assembly also concurred in four bills related to administrative rulemaking that were part of a package titled the “red tape reset,” which was introduced in May with the support of the conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).
One bill SB 277 would have all administrative rules sunset after seven years unless a rule is adopted again through an agency process. The Assembly amended the bill, so it will go back to the Senate.
Three of the bills will now go to Evers for consideration. Those include SB 276, which would allow those who have challenged the validity of an administrative rule to receive attorney fees and costs if a court declares a rule invalid; SB 275, which would limit the use of scope statements to one proposed rule; and SB 289, which would require agencies to make cuts to offset the cost associated with new regulations.
The constitutional amendment as well as several other bills are the result of a task force organized by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and chaired by Jacobson.
AB 910, which passed on a voice vote, would establish a process to review fees every 6 years.
AB 955, which passed on a voice vote, would repeal the current language in state law that allows agencies to promulgate rules interpreting the provisions of any statute enforced or administered by the agency if it is necessary to enforce the statute. The bill would replace the language, prohibiting agencies from promulgating rules interpreting the provisions of any statute without explicit and specific statutory authority.
AB 994, which passed on a voice vote, would restrict agencies from promulgating rules if they are delinquent in complying with the reporting requirement and expand the process for repealing certain rules.
AB 995, which passed on a voice vote, would change the default effective date for permanent administrative rules to the first day of the seventh month after the date of final publication.
Democratic lawmakers sought to get votes on the floor on several issues, introducing an array of amendments to Republican bills. Some of those included protecting access to contraception and abortion in Wisconsin, requiring former lawmakers to be at least a year out of the Legislature before they can become lobbyists and clarifying the residency requirements for lawmakers. However, none received votes as Republicans took procedural steps to avoid bringing them up.
“These are going to keep coming forward,” Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) warned her Republican colleagues as she criticized them for not voting on the bills. “Democrats aren’t giving up on fighting for our constituents, whether we’re talking about the government, whether we’re talking about reproductive freedom or frankly, whether we’re talking about things that would reduce the cost of living for folks in the state. The Republicans time and time again, refused to take a vote.”
The Assembly also approved several bills that will now head to Evers’ desk.
The Assembly passed SB 652 which seeks to eliminate “race-based” programs offered through the state’s higher education system, including the minority teacher loan program and minority undergraduate grants. Under the bill, it would instead require the programs to focus on “disadvantaged” students, meaning those who have “experienced any unfavorable economic, familial, geographic, physical or other personal hardship.” It passed 53-45 along party lines and will now go to Evers for consideration.
SB 498, which passed, would place a number of restrictions in state statute that Republican lawmakers argue would help protect free speech. Those include barring UW institutions from restricting speech from a speaker, creating “free speech” zones, charging security fees as a part of a permit application and sanctioning people for discriminatory harassment unless the speech “targets its victim on the basis of a protected class under law, and is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars a student from receiving equal access to educational opportunities or benefits.”
SB 405, which would create a civil cause of action against health care providers who perform gender transition procedures on someone under the age of 18 if the patient claims to be injured, passed along party lines. It will now go to Evers, who is likely to veto it.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison saw a 17 percent decrease in federal research funding since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to outgoing Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin.
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Students have a chance to save money on college credits and the time it would take them to complete a degree. But studies show opportunities are not consistent across Wisconsin or demographics.
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A cascade effect appears to be pushing more students of color to Wisconsin’s four-year public universities.
The post How end of affirmative action is affecting Black and Hispanic enrollment at Wisconsin colleges appeared first on WPR.
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said her experience leading UW-Madison during a "complex time," which included encampments, DEI and federal funding cuts, prepared her to head the Ivy League university.
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It’s a tumultuous time for student loan borrowers.
Following years of waiving payments and penalties after the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Education announced in December it would soon begin garnishing the wages of borrowers who’ve defaulted on their loans.
Then, Jan. 16, department officials reversed course, saying they would wait to start “involuntary collections” until other changes to the student loan system take effect. They did not specify how long the delay would last.
Another major student loan change is pending court approval. The agreement, which settles a lawsuit brought by the department, would end the popular Biden-era repayment plan Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE). The plan offered borrowers more flexibility than any other.
Meanwhile, other changes to borrowing and repayment programs will reduce the options available to current and future students.
More than 720,000 Wisconsinites hold student loans, according to U.S. Department of Education data analyzed by researchers at the Education Data Initiative. Of those, 74,000 were in default as of last September, meaning they hadn’t made a payment in at least 270 days, and the number has likely grown since then. Overall, the state’s borrowers owe around $23.6 billion. What do all these changes mean for them?
“There have been so many announcements … The landscape is going to continue to be really confusing,” said Carole Trone, executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition on Student Debt, which runs a helpline providing free, confidential advice for people who have loans or are considering taking one out.
“Borrowers often express that they’re confused and overwhelmed,” Trone said. “What our organization is thinking of is how we can reach those borrowers and help them work through their confusion and feel confident with the path forward.”
The helpline received about 160 calls last year, and it can accommodate far more, Trone said. For privacy, staff don’t record any details about the caller or the reason for the person’s call, and they don’t ask for login information for callers’ loan accounts. To reach the helpline toll-free, call (833) 589-0750, or email studentloanquestions@debtsmarts.org. Staffing for the helpline is provided by Ascendium Education Group. Ascendium is a financial supporter of Wisconsin Watch, but is not involved in editorial decisions.
Wisconsin Watch spoke to Trone about what borrowers and prospective borrowers need to know right now. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The helpline was originally set up back in the early days of the pandemic … When you call the toll-free helpline, you’re going to talk to a live person. These are trained professionals whose work, day in and day out, is working with student loan borrowers, helping them navigate the complicated process and helping them understand what might be confusing that’s come out in the news or in notices they’ve gotten.
The helpline is not a replacement for talking to your loan servicer (the company where you send payments) or logging in to your account at studentaid.gov and seeing what loans are recorded there. But what our helpline is designed to provide is a very accessible, no-wait-time forum where you can ask one-on-one, “Hey, I got this notice. What do you think it means?” or “I haven’t been paying. What should I start with doing?”… It’s a really good starting point for anyone.
In 2020, there was this historic payment pause for loans because of the challenges from the pandemic. In Wisconsin, we don’t have a statewide helpline for student loan borrowers. We don’t have an ombudsman, we don’t have a higher ed agency. These are where borrowers in other states can often turn to, so we wanted to be able to provide a resource.
This option to garnish wages was around last year. What’s new is that they (took) the next step, which is starting to send letters out to affected borrowers. Policy says you’re supposed to have 30 days notice before (garnishment) happens. The other thing they can do is withhold your tax refund if you’re in default or severely delinquent on your loan.
The other thing that could be almost as damaging is that your credit score is going to be affected. And just to give you a sense of how really devastating this impact could be, if you did a four-year program and you took out loans for each semester, that’s probably eight semesters minimum, so you’ve got eight loan lines. If you are late in paying, that means you’ve got eight nonpayment reports going to the credit agencies. What was happening even last year was that credit reporting had resumed, and people may not have been aware of it until they went to take out a car loan or a mortgage, and they couldn’t because their credit score tanked maybe 100 or more points.
First, we know borrowers are feeling a lot of emotional pain over this. If you’re stressed out, if you’re embarrassed, if you’re overwhelmed, sometimes people just can’t move forward on this. I want to encourage people to call our helpline or email us. That is exactly what we are here for.
There are ways that you can get out of default that are tied to your income levels … You can start to rehabilitate your loan. You have to request a form from your loan servicer. They’ll need to know your income to be able to set an income-driven repayment amount. And if that amount is too much, you need to let the servicer know that … Based on your income, that mandatory payment can be as low as $10 a month. The point is to show that you are making on-time, monthly payments for nine months, and that will restore your loan. But you need to be serious when you’re doing that.
If you’re in SAVE, you’re still in what they’re calling “administrative forbearance” because of all this litigation. But as of last August, your loan balance is growing because they resumed collecting interest. If you’re in the SAVE program and you are eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, you should know that while you’re in (administrative forbearance), you’re not making any progress toward the payment count that you need … There will be a timeline for when people have to move out of the SAVE program, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they have that timeline starting as early as summer.
If you’re trying to figure out what you can do, you can call our helpline. There is also a really helpful loan simulator tool on the studentaid.gov website. You can say “My number one priority is to be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” or “I want to pay off my loan as fast as possible,” or “I want the lowest possible payment,” and it can give you pretty accurate scenarios of what you can expect your payment amount to be.
The goal is to create fewer programs and fewer options.
The goal is to create fewer programs and fewer options. In principle, I think everyone would appreciate more simplicity. What has happened is that all these repayment plans have come out of different administrations and regulatory initiatives. Those are now getting caught up in the courts. One thing to know is that Public Service Loan Forgiveness came through Congress (rather than the regulatory process), and that’s why it’s on much firmer ground.
There will be basically one income-based repayment plan, called RAP (Repayment Assistance Plan), and there’s the standard repayment plan. It’s not like on July 1 of this year there’s a light switch and everyone is in RAP. Many of those (existing) plans will continue on the terms those borrowers agreed to. It will be new loans that will start to have only those two options.
We know that in areas like health care or in fields like law, people do (sometimes) borrow more than what these new limits are going to be. And so there’s been a lot of attention now to who’s going to be affected by that. If you’re borrowing more than the $200,000 limit, for instance, to be a medical doctor, what’s that going to mean? … Colleges and professional schools are concerned that people who are currently in their programs will hit the final year or two years of their programs and not be able to borrow the money to complete their programs.
There is a concern that the contingent of borrowers who don’t have the assets (and) the strong credit ratings to be able to turn to the private loan market won’t have options and therefore won’t pursue these degrees.
Private loans have a lot fewer protections than federal loans. They do not have forbearance, so when you take out that loan, repayment pretty much starts as soon as you’ve taken it out. They don’t have income-driven repayment options. If you take out a loan to go to a college and they’ve misrepresented the value of their degrees or what jobs their graduates are getting, there are federal protections that you don’t have with a private loan provider.
The big thing related to equity is that if you don’t have a high enough credit rating to qualify for the loan, you’ll be denied. And so, in the worst-case scenario, we’re worried that for these high-cost health care degrees, we will see a lot fewer first-generation, lower-income students going into those professions.
I think there is justifiable concern about student loan debt, but we are seeing signs that many more students are hesitating or choosing not to pursue postsecondary education because they figure that’s the only way to avoid student loan debt. The challenge with that approach is that the economic studies say most jobs are going to require some kind of postsecondary credential. So we do want to make sure that students and potential borrowers read up and learn about what their programs are going to cost.
In Wisconsin, the average amount of student loan debt that an undergraduate takes on is about $33,000 for someone who completes their degree. So when you hear the stories of huge amounts of debt, those things happen. It’s heartbreaking to see those stories, but it’s not the norm.
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that the Wisconsin Coalition on Student Debt helpline received about 160 calls last year.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Student loan borrowers are ‘confused and overwhelmed.’ Here’s what Wisconsinites should know. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Wisconsinites owe $23.6 billion in student loans, and thousands of Wisconsin borrowers are in default. But Carole Trone, executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition on Student Debt, doesn’t want those kinds of numbers to scare students away from college altogether.
“I think there is justifiable concern about student loan debt,” said Trone, whose group helps Wisconsinites figure out costs before, during and after college.
“But we are seeing signs that many more students are hesitating or choosing not to pursue postsecondary education because they figure that’s the only way to avoid student loan debt,” Trone said. The problem with that plan, she said, is that studies suggest most of the jobs of the future will require some sort of credential beyond a high school diploma.
She’d like students to hear a different number: $33,000. “In Wisconsin, the average amount of student loan debt that an undergraduate takes on is about $33,000 for someone who completes their degree. So when you hear the stories of huge amounts of debt, those things happen. It’s heartbreaking to see those stories, but it’s not the norm.”
Trone talked with Wisconsin Watch about what students can do at every step in their education to reduce what they borrow and increase the chance they’ll be able to pay it back.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid was simplified in 2024, making it easier for students to apply for Pell grants and federal financial aid.
“It has finally, truly gotten better, easier, simpler — at long last — so it is completely worth it to do it,” said Trone. “It keeps your options open.”
“I caution people about talking about their ‘dream college,’” Trone said. Instead, she urges students to make a list of things like how much they’re willing to pay, what kinds of programs they’re considering and the typical salaries for those professions.
Then, she recommends students use the Department of Education’s College Scorecard website to compare schools.
“Not all programs cost the same, and not all programs are worth the same … You want to look for colleges that have strong graduation rates. You want to see how many students get financial aid. You want to see what the net cost of attendance is,” Trone said.
Sometimes students end up paying more for school because the school doesn’t accept their prior credits, or because they need a class that’s seldom offered.
“If you’re trying to bring credits into that institution, talk to someone about that. Don’t just assume that those credits will transfer,” Trone said. “Try to map out what classes you need to take, and meet with your adviser and figure out when those classes are being offered.”
When colleges send financial aid offer letters, they list the maximum amount the student can borrow. But students have the option to borrow less or decline loans altogether, and they can make those decisions until around the time they’re enrolling in classes.
“Make sure that you have really thought about do you actually really need to borrow this money, because you’ll be paying it back with interest,” Trone said.
Student loans come due whether a student graduates or not. Those who don’t are more than twice as likely to end up in default, according to research by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
“The most important thing that you can do to be able to repay any loans you take out is to finish your program,” Trone said. People leave school for all sorts of reasons, including family commitments and job changes. “A lot of that can be really unavoidable … but those are the borrowers that often have the most difficulty in repaying their loans.”
One simple step can help keep borrowers on track: signing into studentaid.gov to update their contact information regularly.
“After you’ve left college, that’s the time when lots of folks are moving around or changing email addresses,” Trone said. “When things start coming due or there’s changes, they need to be able to reach you.”
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
6 tips for avoiding student loan default is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
In a state where marijuana remains illegal, UW-Platteville is enrolling continuing education students in its online cannabis program to learn about the cultivation, compliance and safe usage of marijuana.
The post UW-Platteville creates online cannabis courses to meet growing job market appeared first on WPR.
Inside University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Christie Theatre, retired judge Mark Warpinski leads a discussion about how judges decide on the sentences they impose. Roughly 50 students nod along, take notes and eagerly wave their hands in the air to debate how they’d sentence someone for a hypothetical crime.
The unusually lively audience betrays that this isn’t a typical sleepy morning lecture — most of Warpinski’s students are over the age of 50.
“We pay attention. We ask questions. We’re not sitting on our cellphones and scrolling … like I guess most college students nowadays do,” said 76-year-old student Norman Schroeder.
Classrooms full of older adults are becoming more common at UWGB.
As Wisconsin’s workforce ages and universities nationwide see fewer traditional college-aged students, UWGB is trying several unorthodox efforts to attract older learners. That includes more short-term certificates that advance workers’ job skills, ungraded courses that keep older students socially engaged and classes in local nursing homes.
University leaders hope these moves will keep the region’s growing retirement-age population sharp and socially engaged — and potentially in the workforce for longer — while also bolstering enrollment.
“We’re not just an 18-year-old campus. We’re not just a campus where you live in the dorms and have a traditional experience,” said Jessica Lambrecht, UWGB’s continuing education and workforce training executive officer. “There’s hundreds of universities you can pick from that offer that type of experience. So how are we gonna stretch and serve more?”
In fall 2025, UWGB joined the Age-Friendly University Global Network, an international web of universities that focus on including all ages. The college must follow the network’s 10 principles, which include supporting those pursuing second careers; expanding online education options; and promoting collaboration between older and younger students, among other tasks. Lambrecht hopes this commitment leads more community groups to help UWGB in its pursuit of older learners.
UWGB’s focus on enrolling people outside the typical 18-to-24 age group has helped the college’s enrollment climb over the past decade, at a time when many universities are seeing the opposite trend.
University leaders hope to do even more to cater to retirees and other older adults in coming years, starting with more courses in assisted living facilities and building ways for older people to mentor younger students and workers.
Wisconsin’s aging population has caused ongoing trouble for its workforce.
For years, there haven’t been enough working-age people to fill the jobs left by those retiring. That trend is expected to continue into 2030.
Lambrecht said UWGB leaders are thinking about how they can “encourage and invite that pre-retirement age population to stay engaged in the workforce a little bit longer.”
They think offering more short-term certificates can help.
Perhaps more commonly offered by two-year colleges, short-term certificates show someone completed a handful of courses focused on a skill or topic. An increasing number of people in the U.S. are seeking these credentials, as they’re cheaper and less time-consuming than degrees. They’re also often marketed as a way for workers to gain knowledge that will help them advance in their career and earn more money, though studies and data have indicated a mixed payoff.
UWGB offers 20 short-term certificate options, ranging from topics such as utilizing artificial intelligence to English-to-Spanish translation.
“Your job is going to continuously change, and with the exponential growth of information, how are you going to stay relevant in the workforce?” Lambrecht said. “So that’s really where continuing professional education programs come into play. It’s giving you short-term, bite-sized programming that’s going to help you refine a skill set that you now are faced with.”
University leaders also want to create more opportunities for younger students and employees to learn from people reaching retirement age. Lambrecht said she’s thinking about how they can “marry those two audiences to be of continued value in our workforce.” For example, last summer, they debuted an “intergenerational” program aiming to connect older adults and youth through several educational workshops.
The quest for more older students isn’t just about keeping them working. It also helps keep the region’s aging population mentally sharp and socially engaged.
UWGB’s Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI) is geared toward older adults who want to “enjoy learning for its own sake.” There are no tests, no grades and no prerequisites. The volunteer-led club offers between 150 and 250 courses each semester — the most popular including history, film and documentary classes, guest lectures and tours around the region.
“When I retired, I realized I’ve got to keep doing things. You can’t just sit in the chair,” said Gary Lewins, a 10-year LLI student. Last semester, he took a class that taught him how to digitize all of his old photo albums.
Norman Schroeder began taking LLI classes in 2018. The retired family doctor said it was good for more than just learning — he quickly made several friends. Today he helms LLI’s Board of Directors and tries to get more people to join.
“LLI is not only just the cognitive stimulation, the brain stimulation of the classes and learning — it’s also the social engagement,” Schroeder said. “Those are important elements for good health. Particularly in older patients, there’s a high incidence of depression, and some of that comes from social isolation … I kind of promote LLI as good for your health.”
The institute has over 800 members, who pay $150 for a year of access to classes. University professors often volunteer to teach classes related to their expertise, happy to teach to a highly engaged audience, Schroeder said.
In early 2025, the Rennes Group, which operates assisted living facilities in northern Wisconsin, gave a $300,000 grant to the institute. UWGB has used the money to host classes at Rennes’ nursing homes, upgrade technology to livestream classes to residents living in them and take residents on outings, such as a tour of the Green Bay Correctional Institution.
“Just because you live in an environment that provides maybe some extra help, doesn’t mean … you shouldn’t have access to things like lifelong learning,” Rennes Group President Nicole Schingick said.
UWGB’s focus on older learners comes as the so-called traditional college student, aged 18 to 24 years old, makes up a smaller share of enrollment nationwide.
In September, Chancellor Michael Alexander sent a letter to faculty and staff outlining how the university must “reinvent” to topple trends like these. To do so, he wrote, UWGB leaders must recognize “every person is a potential student over their lifetime, not just at 18 with stellar high school academic credentials.”
In their quest to grow enrollment, college leaders have trained their focus on not just older learners, but younger ones, too.
“(We’re) trying to think about the bookends of the population, knowing that the 18- to 24-year-old is a shrinking demographic,” Lambrecht said. “If we’re going to thrive as a university, we have to think outside the box.”
In 2020, for example, the college launched a program for high schoolers to complete associate degrees through the university for free. High schoolers have comprised a growing share of the university’s student population over the years, from 16% in fall 2018 to more than a third of enrollment today.
In 2024, 12% of UWGB’s students were over the age of 30, though that figure only includes students who are taking classes for credit and does not include students like those involved in the Lifelong Learning Institute.
These approaches have helped UWGB’s total enrollment grow over 3,300 students in the last decade, while nearly every other UW school has seen a net decrease over the same time frame.
It’s common to see people of all ages on the Green Bay campus. In the summer, UWGB rents out its empty dorms as “snowbird housing” to older adults. But college leaders want to do even more in coming years to reach older people — particularly those who can’t come to campus.
“The reality is, some of our members have mobility issues,” Schroeder said. “When you’re an 18- to 20-year-old college student, walking any distance is not a big deal. But if you’re on the campus at UWGB, sometimes it’s a long walk from the parking lot to get into the classrooms.”
UWGB leaders hope to offer more virtual classes for older students who are home-bound or have physical limitations. To assist those with hearing loss, they want to add “hearing loops” to classrooms, which transmit sound from a microphone directly into a hearing aid. Eventually, they want Rennes residents to have access to the full catalog of lifelong learning classes virtually, in real time, Schingick said.
“That would really be able to open the doors globally, if you will, to all of our residents and all of our communities, no matter where they are in the state,” Schingick said.
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
As Wisconsin ages, UW-Green Bay looks to older adults to boost enrollment — and keep minds sharp is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
At a time when American politics are increasingly polarized and partisan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is launching a new undergraduate major focused on working across those divides to create evidence-based public policy.
The public policy major, debuting in fall 2026, is the first undergraduate major from the La Follette School of Public Affairs. The Wisconsin Legislature created the school in 1983 to educate future public servants for state and local government. In 2019, after decades of offering only graduate programs, the school added undergraduate certificates — UW-Madison’s version of a minor — in public policy and later in health policy.
Today, they’re among the most popular certificates on campus, said La Follette School Director Susan Webb Yackee. The animosity and gridlock that plague American politics hasn’t discouraged students. In fact, she thinks it’s only made them more interested.
“This could be a time when our young people are running away from our policy problems, but many of them are running toward them,” Yackee said, noting that she’s seen particular interest in policies about health, environment and climate change.
With the new major, those young people will have the option to make public policy their primary focus. School leaders say that it’s the first public policy major in Wisconsin and that it may be the only one in the country focused on teaching students how to engage in civil dialogue and find common ground.
Those are the skills society needs today, Yackee said.
“In a 50-50 state like Wisconsin, in a 50-50 country like the United States, we won’t be able to solve our big public policy problems by simply taking the point of view that one might agree with,” Yackee said. “We will have to work across the political aisle to make real change.”
Yackee spoke to Wisconsin Watch about how she hopes the new program will transform students, campus and the future of policymaking in the United States.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What exactly is public policy, and how is it different from political science?
Public policy is the study of government institutions as well as decision making that affects everyone’s lives. That differs from political science in the sense that we’re interested in not just the politics of how those decisions get made, but also whether public policies that go into effect work or not. Evaluating what works and what doesn’t in existing public policy, as well as predicting what kinds of policies may work and why, is a terrifically important part of our faculty research, as well as the classes that students take….
I’m a political scientist, but most of our faculty at the La Follette School are economists. They’re oftentimes much more focused on … Does that policy work? How is it different than policies in other states? If there’s a policy change, did that change actually match what legislators or practitioners wanted to see happen?
Why did the faculty decide to focus the new curriculum on civil dialogue and finding common ground?
Our mission is evidence-based policymaking, and we quickly identified that to get to our mission, people had to be able to sit down in the same room and talk about it. You have to be able to talk before you can talk about evidence … That was a need we felt we could serve particularly well within our major … That’s also a skill that a lot of our undergraduate students on campus, who might not be public policy majors, could also benefit from.
For some people, this feels like a sort of dismal time for politics or public policy. What are you hearing from students about why they’re interested in public policy and what kinds of problems they want to solve?
It’s absolutely true that politics and our current public policy atmosphere turns off a lot of people right now. But very interestingly, we’re seeing huge student engagement in public policy on campus …
A lot of UW-Madison students are interested in working in the nonprofit sector. Many nonprofits need to be able to evaluate their programs to see if they work or not … We teach classes in: How would we understand the goals of the program? How would we quantify them? … So the kind of skills-based classes that we teach have a lot of translation into other fields beyond just government service.
Do you hear students expressing frustration with politicians today?
I think there’s a lot of frustration with inaction, and I think that’s normal for traditionally aged college students. Is that any different today than it was in the 1970s or the 1950s? They’re impatient for change, and good for them. I am too, and I love their impatience.
Let me give you a concrete example of a class I taught … It was for students to do applied policy analysis with real-world clients. This class happened to have three real-world clients, and they were all sitting Wisconsin legislators…
The first day of class was me saying, “Some of you are going to get assigned to work with a Republican (client), and some of you are going to get assigned to work with a Democrat … and if that’s a problem for you in this class, then you ought not to take it, because we are going to provide the best nonpartisan analysis that we can possibly provide to these elected members so that they can make the best decisions they can make for our state.”
It was sort of like a pin drop when I said that. Nobody dropped the class. Those students did a fabulous job … A lot of those students were bio majors or chem majors — they weren’t political science majors. They did these reports on these topics, and some of them have now been passed into state law. So they were part of the ecosystem which created real change.
The students … (also) testified in one of the Senate committee rooms in the Wisconsin Legislature… They presented. They were asked questions. Afterwards, one of the students came up to grab me and said, “Dr. Yackee, this is the professional thrill of my lifetime” …
That class is sort of a nutshell of what we’re hoping to accomplish in this undergraduate major.
What do we know about how to promote civil dialogue and find common ground and about how to teach people to do that?
One of the things that we know about teaching classes on talking across the political divide is the importance of establishing ground rules in terms of how those conversations are going to take place. One of our current faculty members, Associate Professor Amber Wichowsky, very much emphasizes curiosity. One of the ground rules for her classes is you need to be curious about how and why people feel differently than yourself …
It’s innate human behavior to put people in different camps of “us” and “them” … If we come into conversations with that framing, we will not be successful. If we come in with a framing of curiosity and an openness to new perspectives and ideas — it is not that we’re looking to change people’s values, but we are looking to humanize the other because that is one step toward being able to listen to other people’s points of view and work across the political divide.
Free speech on campus is a hot topic these days. How do you hope the major and the skills that you’re providing students might create the kind of environment that you’d like to see on campus?
Great question. I think of it like my bicep: I don’t work out as much as I should, but the more I work out that muscle, the stronger it gets. I think we don’t have enough opportunities for students to engage with people that are different than them and think differently than them.
Let me submit that a university is a place of ideas, so the most important kind of diversity is the diversity of ideas. It should be a fundamental job of ours to encourage those interactions … We’re going to do that in our classes, but we’re also going to do that by hosting politicians and practitioners and journalists that have different points of view. We’ve done that now for years, and we will continue to do that.
So if this major is successful, how do you picture the campus will be different?
We hope that it would provide an outlet for students who are interested in applied politics and policy and careers in that space to have a fuller and richer UW-Madison educational experience …
If we can position students with (these) skills … and they can be trained and ready to go when our country arguably needs them more than ever, then we will have done our job as educators, but we’ll also have done our job in promoting the Wisconsin Idea in a really important way.
Have a question about jobs or job training in Wisconsin? Or want to tell a reporter about your struggle to find the right job or the right workers? Email reporter Natalie Yahr, nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org, or call or text her at 608-616-0752.
Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus.
New UW-Madison major will teach students to bridge partisan divides is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Madison’s Vel Phillips Memorial High School, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars.
At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.
After extensive renovations, the lab reopened last year with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit.
Through a process called dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five Madison College credits for free and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. That’s allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals.
Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply.
That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable.
“What’s at stake is access to opportunity, especially for high school students at Title I, lower-income high schools, rural high schools … It’s really been an on-ramp for so many students,” said John Fink, who studies dual enrollment at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. “But we also know that many students are left behind.”
To teach the auto class, Tokheim had to apply to become a Madison College instructor. As a certified auto service technician with a master’s degree, the veteran teacher met the college’s requirements for the course.
But for many teachers, teaching dual enrollment would require enrolling in graduate school, even if they already have a master’s degree.
That, school leaders say, is a hard sell, despite the state offering to reimburse districts for the cost. Teachers in Wisconsin often don’t make much more money teaching advanced courses the way they do in some other states, and adding these courses doesn’t raise a school’s state rating.
“You’re asking people who are well educated to begin with to go back to school, which takes time and effort, and their reward for that is they get to teach a dual credit class,” said Mark McQuade, Appleton Area School District’s assistant superintendent of assessment, curriculum and instruction.
Nationwide, the number of high schoolers earning college credit has skyrocketed in recent years. In Wisconsin, the tally has more than doubled, with students notching experience in subjects ranging from manufacturing to business.
Most earn credit from their local technical college without leaving their high school campus. In the 2023-24 school year, 1 in 3 community college students in the state was a high schooler.
Education and state leaders have welcomed the trend, pointing to the potential benefits: Students who take dual enrollment classes are more likely to enroll in college after high school. They can save hundreds or thousands of dollars on college tuition and fees. If they do enroll in college, they spend less time completing a degree.
“It also proves to the kids — to some of our kids that are first-generation — that they can do college work,” McQuade said.
But not all students get these advantages. Many Wisconsin schools offer very few dual enrollment courses, or none at all. A July Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis showed small, urban or high-poverty schools are least likely to offer the classes.
Wisconsin Watch talked to leaders in five school districts. All said the shortage of qualified teachers was one of the biggest barriers to growing their dual enrollment programs.
In 2015, the Higher Learning Commission — which oversees and evaluates the state’s technical colleges — released new guidelines about instructor qualifications. The new policy required many of Wisconsin’s dual enrollment teachers to have a master’s degree and at least 18 graduate credits in the subject they teach, just like college instructors.
In 2023, the Commission walked back the new policy.
By then, colleges across the state had already adopted the higher standard.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin schools have struggled to hire and retain teachers, even without college credit involved. Four in 10 new teachers stop teaching or leave the state within six years, a 2024 Department of Public Instruction analysis shows.
The subject-specific prerequisite is much different from the graduate education K-12 teachers have historically sought: the kind that would help them become principals or administrators, said Eric Conn, Green Bay Area Public Schools’ director of curricular pathways and post-secondary partnerships.
“To advance in education, it wasn’t about getting a master’s in a subject area. It was getting a master’s in education to develop into educational administration or educational technology,” Conn said. For teachers who already have a master’s degree, he said, going back to school just to teach one or two new classes is “a large ask.”
When the Higher Learning Commission announced the heightened requirements in 2015, leaders of the Wisconsin Technical College System sounded the alarm. They warned 85% of the instructors currently teaching these classes could be disqualified, whittling students’ college credit opportunities.
Wisconsin education leaders called on the Legislature to allocate millions of dollars to help teachers get the training they’d need — and they agreed. In 2017, lawmakers created a grant program to reimburse school districts for teachers’ graduate tuition.
But of the $500,000 available every year, hundreds of thousands go unused.
“Nobody’s ever, ever requested this funding and been denied because of a funding shortage,” said Tammie DeVooght Blaney, executive secretary of the Higher Educational Aids Board, which manages the grant.
Tuition and fees for a single graduate credit at a Universities of Wisconsin school can cost over $800, putting the total cost of 18 graduate credits around $15,000. For teachers who don’t already have a master’s degree, the cost is even steeper. The state grant requires teachers or districts to front the cost and apply for reimbursement yearly, with no guarantee they’ll get it.
A handful of Green Bay teachers have used the grant, Conn said, but many just aren’t interested in returning to school, even if it’s free.
The district offers 50 dual enrollment courses, but he’d like to offer classes in more core subjects, which help students meet college general education requirements. There just aren’t enough teachers qualified to teach college sciences and math to offer the same options across the district’s four high schools.
Teachers are busy, and not just in the classroom, said Jon Shelton, president of AFT-Wisconsin, one of the state’s teachers unions. Many already spend extra hours coaching, grading or leading after-school activities. Those who do go back to school typically enroll in one class at a time, he said, meaning they could be studying for several years.
The financial perks for teachers returning to school for dual enrollment credentials are dubious at best.
Some teachers get a salary bump for obtaining a master’s degree, and some earn modest bonuses for teaching dual enrollment. But many teachers make no more than they would have without the extra training.
“There’s no incentive,” said Tokheim, the Madison auto instructor, who receives a $50 yearly stipend for teaching the college course. In contrast to his standard classes, his dual enrollment class required him to attend two kinds of training.
There’s little incentive for schools either. They receive no extra state funding to offer college-level courses. Plus, the classes don’t factor into their state report card score, which measures students’ standardized test performance and graduation preparation, among other things.
Leaders at Sheboygan’s Central High School wish it did. At that school, where the majority of students are Latino and almost all are low-income, 1 in 3 students took dual enrollment courses in the 2023-24 school year. Still, the state gave the school a failing grade.
“It’s an afterthought in our report card, and it’s always the thing that we can celebrate,” Principal Joshua Kestell said.
So why would a teacher take on the added schooling?
“It’s good for kids,” Tokheim said. “That’s why they get us teachers, because we care too much.”
Other potential draws: the challenge of teaching more rigorous courses or the opportunity to collaborate with college instructors.
Heather Fellner-Spetz retired two years ago from teaching English at Sevastopol High School in Sturgeon Bay. She taught college-level oral communication classes for 10 years before she retired. When the Higher Learning Commission set the heightened requirements, she was allowed to continue teaching dual enrollment while she studied for more graduate credits.
“There wasn’t much I didn’t enjoy about teaching it. It was just fabulous,” Fellner-Spetz said.
She especially liked having a college professor observe her class, and she said it was good for the students, too. “When they had other people come into the room and watch the lesson or watch them perform, it just ups the ante on pressure.”
Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether it’s necessary for dual enrollment teachers to have the same credentials as college professors.
“Folks running these programs generally would say that teaching a quality college course to a high school student requires a unique skill set that blends high school and college teaching, and that is not necessarily captured by the traditional (graduate coursework) standard,” Fink said.
Wisconsin educators are divided on that question. Fox Valley Technical College has kept the higher standard, limiting the number of Appleton teachers who qualify. McQuade, the Appleton leader, questions those “restrictions,” saying he believes his teachers are well qualified to teach college-level courses. A different standard tied to student performance, for example, could let his district offer more classes across each of its schools.
Schauna Rasmussen, dean of early college and workforce strategy at Madison College, said the answer isn’t to lower the standard, but to help more teachers reach it.
In October, a group of Republican Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at making it easier for students to find dual enrollment opportunities. It would create a portal for families to view options and streamline application deadlines, among other changes.
It doesn’t address the shortage of qualified teachers.
“Separate legislation would likely have to be introduced addressing expanding the pool of teachers for those programs,” Chris Gonzalez, communications director for lead author state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, wrote in an email.
As of Monday no such legislation has been introduced.
Correction: This story has been corrected to note that the Higher Learning Commission revised its policy on faculty qualifications in 2023. The current policy requires that colleges have “reasonable policies and procedures to determine that faculty are qualified” but it states colleges can consider “a variety of factors, including academic credentials, progress towards academic credentials, equivalent experience, or some combination thereof.” Wisconsin Watch regrets the error.
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, and Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide. They work in partnership with Open Campus.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin high schools want to offer more college classes. First, teachers must go back to school. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
It took Allison Beining and Kaitlyn Weyenberg almost three years to get accepted into Fox Valley Technical College’s dental hygiene program. While they inched up the waiting list for one of the coveted 15 spots, they completed dental assisting training, which taught them to operate radiographic equipment and sterilize medical instruments, among other skills.
Now, as the two students prepare to graduate and begin working as hygienists, the Appleton-based college is debuting a $2.1 million expansion to oral health training — so future students won’t have to wait as long to enroll. Across the state, 13 more campuses are unveiling similar projects.
Following a $20 million investment from the Legislature, Wisconsin’s technical colleges are trying to solve the state’s dental worker shortage by revamping their oral health programs, constructing upgraded labs and enrolling hundreds more students.
“We know that this is a need, and this expansion allows us to serve more students in these programs than we had previously, which means more hygienists, more assistants into the community and into the workforce quicker,” FVTC Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Lanter said.
Wisconsin’s dearth of dental workers has been well documented in recent years. Forty-two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties are impacted by the scarcity, according to the Rural Health Information Hub.
Dentists are poorly distributed across the state, with an uneven share practicing in metropolitan areas and too few in rural regions. Too few dental hygienists and assistants — largely trained by technical schools — have entered the field to replace those who have retired in recent years.
Officials at nearly every Wisconsin technical college are looking to respond by expanding their training capacity. The technical college system trains about 2,200 students in oral health professions each year, and the new state funding will allow colleges to increase enrollment by about 10%, System President Layla Merrifield said.
An influx of students graduating and entering the workforce should make booking oral health care appointments easier, industry officials say.
“Not only was it a workforce issue for our dentist offices, but it was starting to impact patient care — access to care — where patients weren’t able to get their cleanings and their routine work done,” said Wisconsin Dental Association Executive Director Mark Paget. “It became a health issue for us, and thankfully, the Legislature understood the problem.”
Industry leaders began staring down the barrel of a dental worker shortage roughly seven years ago. Then, an influx of hygienists retired during the COVID-19 pandemic, “throwing gasoline on the fire,” Paget said.
The dental association created a task force with the state’s technical college system, the Office of Rural Health and the Workforce Development Association to discuss solutions.
It quickly identified a major snag keeping new workers from entering the profession: The state’s eight dental hygiene training programs were all at capacity, with students stuck on waiting lists to participate.
“We met with the technical colleges several times and said, ‘OK, what would it take to increase your class sizes?’ Because that’s obviously where the problem is. There’s just not enough capacity for the schools to teach the classes,” Paget said. “The technical college said the magic words. It’s always money, right? It always boils down to money.”
Merrifield said the steep cost of installing equipment, such as chairs and tools, was a major barrier to colleges educating more students.
In FVTC’s case, that meant some of the dental lab spaces were physically cramped, which allowed room for fewer learners and sometimes led to errors.
“The sterilization room … it was so small,” Beining, the student, recalled. “Things would get lost, people would get frustrated.”
In 2023, the dental association’s advocacy team lobbied the Legislature for more money to increase training capacity. Lawmakers allocated $20 million in that year’s budget to expand the oral health care workforce, such as increased class sizes, new programs and investments in equipment.
The funds flowed to the technical college system, which dispersed portions to schools as grants. Fourteen out of 16 colleges received a share, Merrifield said.
While roughly half of the colleges offer dental hygiene programs, some funding went to assistant training and creating Expanded Function Dental Auxiliary certificate programs, which give advanced training to dental assistants. FVTC used grant funds to introduce an EFDA certificate this year.
Inside Lakeshore College’s dental lab, it might be easy to forget you’re on a college campus and not inside a dentist’s office. The space is outfitted with a reception desk and waiting room, 11 sleek dental chairs and a locker room for students to dress in their scrubs.
The college, based in Cleveland, Wisconsin, used its $1.2 million in grant funds to renovate its dental lab, upgrade equipment and introduce a dental hygiene associate degree.
Previously, Lakeshore College offered only a semester-long dental assistant certificate. Now, the college will increase to training 15 assistant students each semester and enroll 10 more in the hygiene program.
“There’s definitely a need in this area,” said Christina McGinnis, Lakeshore’s dental program coordinator. “Often when you call the dentist, it takes a long time to get in. So having more chairs, more students can definitely help fill that void in the local community.”
Inside a newly constructed classroom, three stations are equipped with mannequin heads with wide-open mouths. The students will practice using their suction and cleaning instruments on the dummies before they work on real people. The simulators are just one of the technology upgrades the college was able to purchase with the grant funds, and they will help students become familiar with the tools they’ll use in the industry.
“(We’re) trying to stay on top of what’s out there, for what our students are going to be seeing when they go out to the community, working as assistants or hygienists,” McGinnis said. “They know what they’re going to be exposed to here, and then they’ll also see that in the dental world.”
Almost all Lakeshore College dental assisting students have a full-time job lined up when they graduate, McGinnis said, and it’s typical for students to enter the field earning $20 per hour. The college is waiting for a dental program accreditor to approve the hygienist degree. Officials hope it will launch in the fall of 2026.
Other Wisconsin technical colleges are starting programs tailored to needs in their service areas. For example, Madison Area Technical College recently renovated its lab and added an EFDA certificate program. Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, surrounded by rural counties with severe shortages, is introducing the state’s first dental therapist training.
“If you’re growing up as a kid on Medicaid in the Northwoods, you almost never see a dentist. It’s very, very difficult to even see a hygienist,” Merrifield said. “So the idea with that particular program is to produce these professionals — not that they’re gonna compete with dentists because they can’t do everything that a dentist can do — but they can expand that access and make it a little bit easier.”
In the meantime, the industry just has to get through the next year or two before the additional students start graduating from the programs and filling the many empty jobs, Paget said.
“The system works exactly how the system was supposed to work,” he said. “The technical colleges, the Legislature, the governor, everybody came together to solve a problem.”
This story was updated with the correct name for Lakeshore College. Wisconsin Watch regrets the error.
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.
Long wait for a dental appointment? Wisconsin tech colleges are working to fix that is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Public college is less affordable in Wisconsin than in nearly every other state, according to a new analysis of 2022-23 school year data. The nonprofit National College Attainment Network, which advocates for college access, reports annually on each state’s “affordability gap” between the cost of college and what students and their families can pay.
The analysis included 28 Wisconsin colleges, finding that all of the state’s public four-year schools and nearly 90% of the technical colleges were unaffordable.
Just four states ranked lower than Wisconsin in the share of their colleges considered affordable: Delaware, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Rhode Island. Nationwide, nearly half (48%) of all public four-year colleges and more than a third (35%) of community or technical colleges were affordable, the report found.
“We saw (Wisconsin) stand out as particularly unaffordable as compared to our national average and to the other states in the region,” said report author Louisa Woodhouse, a senior associate for the organization.
To estimate what students could pay at each school, Woodhouse added up the average grants, loans and work study payments they receive, as reported in a federal database. She added that to an estimate of summer wages — based on full-time work at the state minimum wage — and an “expected family contribution” using average Pell grant awards.
Woodhouse compared those figures with each school’s published cost of attendance. That included tuition, fees and estimated costs of items like housing, food, books and transportation. She added a flat $300 for emergency expenses.
The report considers a college affordable if attendance and emergency expenses totaled less than income and aid.
The study included 13 Wisconsin public colleges or universities that grant bachelor’s degrees, as well as 15 of the state’s 16 technical colleges. It excluded Madison College, which belongs to the technical college system but is classified as a four-year school in federal data.
None of the four-year schools and just two technical colleges were affordable, Woodhouse found.
Wisconsin technical college students face an average affordability gap of $1,336, nearly triple the $486 national average, Woodhouse calculated.
Students at Wisconsin’s four-year schools experienced a $3,549 gap, more than twice the national average of $1,555.
Calling affordability and accessibility “cornerstones of our mission,” Universities of Wisconsin spokesperson Ethan Schuh noted that the system charges the lowest average tuition rates in the Upper Midwest.
“We recognize there can be affordability gaps,” Schuh said in an email, adding that the report’s “novel datasets and methodologies” might “unintentionally disadvantage universities with low tuition and limited aid,” like those in the UW system.
Schuh attributed cost issues raised in the report to broader national trends, which “underscore the need for continued investment in financial aid and student support.”
“While we are not immune to these challenges, we are actively working to address them,” Schuh said.
Wisconsin Technical College System spokesperson Katy Pettersen said the report “raises important concerns about affordability.” But she questioned whether the study’s methodology accurately evaluated the state’s tech colleges, where students often attend school part time while working full time. Many earn above minimum wage in Wisconsin’s competitive labor market, Pettersen said.
Meanwhile, Pettersen said, Wisconsin’s technical colleges work differently than counterparts in other states, making them hard to compare. Wisconsin’s tech colleges emphasize hands-on education in technology-intensive labs, while many community colleges elsewhere prioritize lower-cost classroom education, Pettersen said.
“We acknowledge that many students face unmet financial needs. Addressing these challenges is a priority, and we continue to explore ways to support students beyond tuition,” Petterson said in an email. “Affordability is a multifaceted issue, and while we recognize the challenges, we remain committed to providing high-value education and supporting students in every way we can.”
Wisconsin college costs are partially the result of state and federal policy decisions. Like many of their Midwestern peers, Wisconsin’s public colleges rely heavily on tuition, Woodhouse said.
Wisconsin’s state government allocates nearly 17% less funding per full-time student than it did in 1980, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association — a trend UW system leaders are closely watching.
Today, the state provides just 20% of the system’s budget, half the share it covered in 1985, Schuh said.
About 60% of university revenue now comes from tuition and fees, nearly triple the previous levels, Schuh added.
“This shift has placed a growing financial burden on students and families, limiting access to the same educational opportunities that have long defined Wisconsin’s public universities,” Schuh said.
Paying for college in Wisconsin could get more difficult in the coming years, Woodhouse said, pointing to recent federal cuts to food aid, Medicaid and other safety net programs. States often fill the gap in those services by diverting money from education.
Colleges, in turn, may raise tuition to patch budget holes, putting college further out of reach.
”That’s just another argument towards the importance of investing in higher education funding, both operational support for public institutions and also need-based aid in the years to come,” Woodhouse said.
Wisconsin tech college tuition over the last decade has risen no faster than inflation, Petterson said. At UW system campuses, tuition rose 4% to 5% this year, following a 10-year tuition freeze.
Political debates are swirling around the value of college, with Republicans increasingly asking whether pursuing a degree is worthwhile. Carole Trone, executive director of the Wisconsin-based Fair Opportunity Project, wants more bipartisan scrutiny of those high price tags.
“Are colleges doing everything they can do to keep the college costs down?” asked Trone, whose organization offers online counseling to help students nationwide apply to and pay for college.
Some studies show inflation-adjusted tuition rates have plateaued or even declined, Trone said, but rent and other living costs are soaring.
“The cost of college keeps going up because of all those other costs that, in some cases, are outside of a college’s control,” Trone said.
Meanwhile, federal aid doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. Federal Pell grant awards, for instance, have increased more slowly than inflation. In 1975, they covered more than three-quarters of the average cost to attend a public, four-year university, according to the National College Attainment Network. That’s compared to just one-third of average attendance costs today.
A growing number of Wisconsin students are eligible to have their full tuition and fees covered with the help of “promise” programs, which pick up remaining costs after eligible students use federal financial aid and scholarships.
UW-Madison’s Bucky’s Tuition Promise, launched in 2018, helps students with household incomes of $65,000 or less. It covers most costs but excludes expenses like rent, groceries or textbooks.
The UW system expanded the program to other campuses in 2023 but cut it the next year due to budget woes.
The system resumed the program this fall with private funding: Madison-based student loan guarantor Ascendium Education Group will cover costs for students in households making $55,000 or less.
Until the program has stable funding, Woodhouse said, eligible students may hesitate to enroll in college for fear of being stuck with costs in future years.
Democratic state lawmakers want to allocate nearly $40 million to provide that stability. They introduced legislation on Thursday to extend the Wisconsin Tuition Promise program with state dollars, covering costs for students of all UW schools except UW-Madison whose families make $71,000 or less.
“Higher education powers Wisconsin and cost should not prevent students from families in every income bracket in Wisconsin from having the opportunity to earn a degree,” Senate Democratic Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, said in an emailed statement.
Schuh said the proposal would allow Wisconsin to compete as other states take steps to lower college costs.
“It would eliminate the affordability gap for thousands of students and restore the promise of higher education as a public good,” Schuh said. “It would ensure that the opportunities available to past generations remain accessible to all Wisconsinites today and into the future.”
Disclosure: Ascendium Education Group is a donor to Wisconsin Watch but has no control over its editorial decisions. A complete list of donors and funders, as well as donation acceptance policies, can be found on our funding page.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Study: Wisconsin trails most states in college affordability is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, opened for new and returning college and university students on Oct. 1. Students typically have until June 1 to apply for the best chance of receiving aid.
The form connects students with loans, grants and scholarships through the U.S. Department of Education and your higher education institution.
Students considering attending a two- or four-year college or university should fill out the FAFSA form, even if they haven’t committed to a school or are unsure whether they will pursue higher education.
Carole Trone serves on the board for College Goal Wisconsin, an organization that hosts FAFSA completion events around the state. She said the FAFSA process usually runs smoother when parents let their student take the lead.
“It works best if the student starts their part of the application and then hands it over to the parent,” Trone said.
Students should first make an account, called a Federal Student Aid (FSA) ID. If a student is a dependent, at least one parent or guardian will need to make a Federal Student Aid ID and contribute to the form.
The Department of Education requires students to provide a Social Security number to fill out the FAFSA form. Contributing parents without a Social Security number can make an account but will need to check a box certifying they don’t have a Social Security number.
When creating a Federal Student Aid ID, Trone said, it’s important to double check that all information, including names and dates of birth, are correct. The Department of Education won’t be able to verify your information if these details are incorrect, which Trone said complicates the process.
If students or parents already have a Federal Student Aid ID, Trone said the ID stays with them forever and they should use the same account.
FAFSA requires certain information from students and parents to verify income, assets and financial need.
The Department of Education will use applicants’ Social Security numbers to access their income with the Internal Revenue Service. Parents and students must give consent for the IRS to access information on their tax returns, even if an applicant doesn’t have tax returns to supply.
The Department of Education recommends still having the most recent tax returns for information that isn’t imported from the IRS.
The form also asks about assets – the current balance of cash, checking and saving accounts – and the net worth of any businesses and investments.
Students will also need to provide a list of schools they’re interested in attending. Students should list all schools even if they aren’t committed.
“The options that FASFA gives you is not just for four-year college, it’s for two-year college, it’s for a number of certification programs,” Trone said. “It doesn’t obligate you to anything.”
The types of federal aid you receive can be split into two main groups: loans and grants. The biggest difference is you need to pay back loans but not grants. Filling out your FAFSA form also helps you become eligible for need-based scholarships through your higher education institution.
You can make payments while enrolled at least part time (six credit hours, usually about two classes) in school but are not required to until after you graduate or go below six credit hours. After you do either of these, it triggers a six-month grace period before you’re required to make payments.
The federal government offers several types of loans in two categories: Direct and Direct PLUS.
The amount of interest on these loans depends on the year you take them out. The interest rate changes each year on July 1.
Students can receive two kinds of Direct loans: subsidized and unsubsidized.
Subsidized loans mean no interest accumulates on the loan while in school or during your grace period, saving the student money in the long run.
Unsubsidized loans accumulate interest beginning when the student takes out the loan.
The Department of Education also offers Direct PLUS loans, which are federal loans that parents of dependent undergraduate students, graduate or professional students can use to help pay for school.
Parents of dependent students can take a Parent PLUS loan to support additional education costs that aren’t covered by other financial aid.
This loan originally did not have a cap, but as a result of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Parent PLUS loans are now capped at $20,000 per year or $65,000 over the course of an undergraduate school career.
Graduate PLUS loans, which were used to support graduate school education, will be eliminated starting in the 2026-27 school year.
A new unsubsidized loan program is replacing Graduate PLUS. Students can borrow up to $20,500 annually, up to $100,000 over the course of graduate school. Students attending professional schools like medicine or law will be eligible to take out higher loans.
Pell grants: Students in need of a lot of financial aid might qualify for a Pell grant. Unlike loans, these do not have to be repaid.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act expanded Pell grant eligibility to shorter workforce training programs.
The amount of aid you receive depends on your financial need.
After a person submits a FAFSA form, the Department of Education considers several factors like income and other assets and generates a Student Aid Index that determines your financial need. The lower your Student Aid Index, the greater chance of receiving more aid.
Colleges and universities look at factors like a student’s Student Aid Index, how many credits are being taken and tuition costs to decide how much aid a student will receive.
Universities and advocates alike caution against using private loans whenever possible because of concerns about predatory lending, potentially high interest rates and a lack of repayment options and forgiveness.
Interest rates and other conditions of the loan often vary on factors like credit scores. If you need to take out a private loan, try to look at offers from several lenders to pick the best one.
College Goal Wisconsin is hosting events virtually and in several Milwaukee high schools to help students and parents complete the FAFSA form. Any students looking for help with a FAFSA form can attend, even if they don’t attend MPS.
Trone said each student who attends is eligible to win one of 15 $1,000 scholarships.
Families who can’t make it to a help session can use resources on the College Goal Wisconsin website or the FAFSA YouTube page, Trone said.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Veritas High School, 3025 W. Oklahoma Ave. Register here.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Riverside University High School, 1615 E. Locust St. Register here.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. virtually. Register here.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. virtually. Register here.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at South Division High School, 1515 W. Lapham Blvd. Register here.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Milwaukee School of Languages, 8400 W. Burleigh St. Register here.
6 p.m. to 8 p.m. virtually. Register here.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
Everything you need to know about FAFSA applications is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
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