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This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news.

Last May, just weeks before the end of the semester, students, staff and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville Baraboo Sauk County received the devastating news that the school was closing. Students scrambled to arrange transfers to other colleges, while employees tried to line up jobs elsewhere in the UW system. By the end of the month, “Boo U,” as it was affectionately named, a fixture in south-central Wisconsin for nearly 60 years, was no more.

The Baraboo campus was just the latest UW school to close its doors. In the past three years, the Universities of Wisconsin system has permanently shuttered eight of its 13 branch campuses. The five that remain open face an uncertain future. With their focus on the liberal arts, these two-year transfer colleges have long provided an accessible, affordable on-ramp to higher education, especially for rural and first-generation college students.

To mark Boo U’s closing, instructors and students held a celebration to pay tribute to the school. Among the guests: members of the very first graduating class, who received their associate degrees in the 1970s, two years after the school opened.

“It was really a memorial,” says Karen DeSanto, a first-term Wisconsin state legislator who represents Baraboo. “The students talked about how this place shaped and changed lives in this community. We don’t have that any more.”

In recent years the pace of colleges shutting down has ticked up. According to analysis by the Hechinger Report, colleges are now closing at a rate of nearly one per week. And yet within this trend of schools on the losing end of a battle with falling enrollment and shrinking resources, the demise of Wisconsin’s two-year colleges remains something of an outlier. The colleges that have closed or are at risk of closing are overwhelmingly private institutions.

Universities of Wisconsin officials have cited steep declines in enrollment to justify the closure of the campuses. While the UW system has seen enrollment drop by more than 10% since 2010, the decline has been especially acute at the two-year schools. In its final year of operation, Boo U had just 100 students, down from more than 500 just a decade ago. Plunging student numbers meant that revenue was no longer enough to keep up with facility, staff and infrastructure costs.

But a shortage of students is only part of the story. Years of budget cuts, beginning under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2015, in concert with a series of tuition freezes, have left the UW system among the worst funded in the nation. The branch campuses were hit particularly hard by the cuts. Then in 2017, UW approved a sweeping merger, making the two-year colleges regional branches of the state’s four-year schools. This set off a competitive scramble for students within the UW system that pitted the two-year schools against bigger, and better resourced, institutions.

“At that point the writing was really on the wall,” says Dan Kallgren, who spent his career teaching history at UW-Marinette, outside of Green Bay.

Marinette was once the third largest branch of the two-year colleges, all of which operated independently under the University of Wisconsin Colleges. But after the merger, enrollment collapsed. In the race to attract students, and revenue, many of the four-year schools, including UW-Green Bay, eased admissions requirements. Students who might have started off at the two-year college now went directly to UW-Green Bay instead.

Marinette ended in-person instruction in 2024, then limped along for another year offering remote classes. Kallgren taught the final course at the school: a Western Civilization survey class, beamed out via video link to students in Manitowoc and Sheboygan. “I was the last faculty member on campus,” recalls Kallgren.

UW officials insist that even with the shuttering of the rural campuses, Wisconsin students still have plenty of options to choose from, including 13 four-year schools across the state and 16 technical colleges.

But Kallgren says that argument fails to acknowledge the unique role that liberal arts schools like Marinette have played in letting rural students effectively try out college in a uniquely supportive and affordable environment before transferring elsewhere.

“Think about the rural kid screwing up his courage and coming here, then getting turned on to engineering or history,” says Kallgren. “That avenue is now closed.”

Education deserts

Despite the popular notion of students venturing far away to attend college, most students enroll at a campus within 20 miles of home. That’s according to extensive research by scholar Nicholas Hillman, who formerly directed a research lab at UW-Madison and is now an education professor at Indiana University. Hillman found that proximity to a college is associated with higher levels of postsecondary enrollment.

But the inverse is also true. As distance grows between a student and a school, the odds of them enrolling drops. Hillman calls regions with fewer colleges and universities “education deserts” and warns that Wisconsin is pursuing the higher education equivalent of “desertification.”

“They’ve hollowed out the two-year schools and the liberal arts transfer mission and now they’re sealing the coffin,” says Hillman. “The question is, if you shut one door, have you opened another?”

That doors are closing for Wisconsin’s rural students appears to be borne out by data. Previous reporting on college access in rural communities found that the number of rural students enrolled in the UW system has dropped at a rate greater than the overall decrease in college attendance. While the decline has many causes, including a political backlash against higher education in the state’s conservative rural regions, the shuttering of the branch campuses is likely to exacerbate that trend.

The winnowing of college options in states like Wisconsin reflects a larger story about inequality in higher education. Douglas Haynes is a professor of English at UW-Oshkosh and the author of “Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond,” a new book on higher education in the upper Midwest. He argues that while institutions that serve low-income and rural students are closing or being starved of resources, Wisconsin’s flagship university, UW-Madison, is able to offer its more affluent student body boundless opportunities. “People don’t realize the contrast between schools where programs are being cut and Madison where the world is your oyster,” says Haynes.

The closure of the two-year schools is likely to further exacerbate the widening divide between educational haves and have nots, Haynes argues. “There are going to be increasing numbers of students who just don’t go to college any more.”

A recent study found that Wisconsin has the second highest rate of “brain drain” in the country, as young, educated workers move out of the state after graduating. Haynes says that diminishing college access creates another form of brain drain in which young rural Wisconsinites are deprived of opportunities at the front end. “When we limit college access we’re also limiting the kind of impact these students might have had in their own communities,” says Haynes.

The Wisconsin Idea

Alex Stevens grew up in Stevenson, Michigan, a small town on the Upper Peninsula. Unlike many of his high school classmates, Stevens always knew that he wanted to attend college and study history, but with a disabled mother, both distance and cost were major concerns.

“I was raised by my grandparents, and I knew that caring for my mother was going to become my responsibility,” says Stevens. He would end up choosing the nearest college option, 25 miles down the road and over the state line in Wisconsin: UW-Marinette. “It just made sense to go there.”

He thrived at the school with its small campus, intimate class sizes and what he describes as top-notch educators, who were eager to work with him. Stevens’ favorite courses were sweeping interdisciplinary examinations of U.S. history taught by professors of history, music and film. After two years, and with almost no college debt, Stevens transferred to UW-Green Bay to pursue a history degree. He now teaches history and social studies at a Catholic high school in Marinette.

“I was rural, poor and smart, and UWM gave me a remarkable opportunity,” says Stevens.

Today, Stevens’s trajectory is much less likely, and not just because the Marinette campus is gone. Wisconsin has also steadily moved away from the liberal arts emphasis that was at the core of the mission of the two-year transfer schools.

In 2023, Jay Rothman, who served as president of the Universities of Wisconsin before he was fired in April of this year, set off a firestorm with his recommendation that colleges in the system shift from liberal arts programs to more career-specific programs, “particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students.” An investigation by Isthmus found that of 82 academic programs within the UW system that have been cut or eliminated in recent years, the majority were in the humanities or social sciences.

“There is an increasingly narrow focus on vocational education,” says Alyssa Ratledge, who studies rural higher education issues at MDRC, a nonprofit research group. She says that closure of the branch campuses and the elimination of majors reflect a broader shift in how states like Wisconsin view the purpose of higher education.

“It’s all about getting a job with a positive ROI (return-on-investment),” says Ratledge. “But students also go to college to try things out and discover who they are.”

As the branch campuses disappear, the expansive notion of higher-education-for-all known as the Wisconsin Idea — the Progressive-era vision that education should improve people’s lives outside the classroom — is also in retreat.

In Baraboo, the community is now debating what to do with a cluster of empty buildings, including the former home of the theater department that once hosted musicals and plays for locals. DeSanto says that the “town and gown” partnership produced generations of performers, from amateur actors like her to aspiring professionals. That loss will be keenly felt, she says. “It’s like a chasm has opened up.”

In 2023, Lauryn Albaugh landed her dream job, leading community engagement for the theater arts program at UW-Marinette. Then came the word that the campus was closing. Today Albaugh is one of just two employees left at the school — a maintenance man inspects the mothballed facilities once a week.

For now, the theater program she oversees is alive and well, thanks to a partnership with UW-Green Bay, private donations and event ticket sales.

Albaugh says that she’s hopeful that the programming, including community and children’s theater, will inspire young people here as it did when she was growing up in Marinette. Cast in “Willy Wonka Jr.” at the age of 7, Albaugh has never looked back. “I really attribute my love for the arts to this theater program. That it’s thriving feels very encouraging.”

Barn Raiser is a nonprofit newsroom covering rural and small town America.

UW campus closures limit rural college access 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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• The federal Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program helped Wisconsin technical colleges provide subsidized child care to student parents. 
• But the U.S. Department of Education awarded just 40 grants this year — a significant drop compared to previous years. 
• No Wisconsin schools received grant funding in the latest round. 
• College officials say students are already cutting their course loads or looking for other ways to pay increased child care costs.

For years, the bills Devvin Thomas Sr. received each semester for his son’s child care at Madison College have been a fraction of what families typically pay: $400 one semester. $10 for another. Sometimes, no bill at all. 

The reduced-cost child care has allowed Thomas to study for his small business entrepreneurship degree and work toward his dream of owning a cafe and soup kitchen.

But this month, that changed. The federal government declined to award grants that have long helped Wisconsin technical college students like Thomas pay for child care while they study for their degrees. Now, student parents across Wisconsin are enrolling in fewer classes, rethinking their semester plans and scrambling to pay the bills. 

For Thomas, the change means a $1,700 bill — a “shock to the system.”

“We’re doing what we can to keep him there. … Outside of paying the mortgage, we just put his tuition and stuff first,” Thomas said. “Even if that means paying the electric bill late or not at all this month.” 

At Madison College, some families have pulled their children from campus child care or reduced their course loads to accommodate cheaper care options. Officials at Madison, Milwaukee and Western technical colleges are searching for other funding sources to help parents remain in school.

“If there’s nobody to take care of their children, they will not be able to be in class,” Madison College President Jennifer Berne said.

The loss comes as child care remains a major expense for Wisconsin families. 

The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families estimates the average cost to put an infant in a child care center is over $17,400 per year — nearly a quarter of the median Wisconsinite’s household income. 

For years, the federal Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program, or CCAMPIS, helped ease that burden for hundreds of Wisconsin families. CCAMPIS grants covered 75% to 95% of participating parents’ child care bills, according to college officials. The funding also helped colleges expand child care services and train more workers for child care jobs. 

Now, no colleges in Wisconsin will receive that funding — adding another obstacle for parents trying to advance their education and careers, college officials say. Berne worries it will take student parents longer to finish their studies — or that it will prevent them from doing so.  

“This is just a small part of the broader child care crisis nationally,” said Liz Wallace, director of grants at Western Technical College in La Crosse.

A ‘shocking’ change

The CCAMPIS program has been around since 1999.

It’s a competitive grant usually given in four-year cycles. Colleges must make a case for how they’ll use the funds to establish or support campus-based child care programs, particularly for low-income students.

Colleges have come to rely on the funding when planning their child care services, said Stephanie Baker, a higher education senior policy manager at left-leaning think tank New America. Many schools launch programs dependent largely on the funds.

But the program has had a rocky few years. The Biden administration did not hold a grant competition in 2024, and the Trump administration did not hold one in 2025 and proposed eliminating the program entirely.

“That wasn’t predictable for colleges, and that’s been difficult if you’re trying to plan for how to build out your child care services to serve parenting students and compete for those funds,” Baker said. 

The U.S. Department of Education opened a competition for four-year grants this year, planning to award 148 schools. While the number of anticipated awards was down by about 50 to 180 grants compared to recent years, the actual number of awards — 40 — was far lower, according to federal documents. Madison, Milwaukee and Western technical colleges were among the nearly 250 schools that applied and didn’t make the cut. No Wisconsin schools received funds. 

“It was shocking to see just over a quarter of the awards they anticipated making. It’s really a betrayal of parenting students in college who, again bipartisan members of Congress want to support,” Baker said. “They keep increasing funds because they want to reach more parents in college and help them access child care that keeps them in school.”

It was disappointing news for officials at Madison College, a school that first received CCAMPIS funds in 2005. When they received a letter last week about the rejection, it said the college earned a perfect score for its use of grant money in previous years, but offered no explanation for the rejection.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., slammed the move in a letter to the Department of Education and cited how the loss of funding will hurt students at Madison College.

What’s lost

Thomas wanted to go back to college to show his two sons that it’s never too late. 

“I’ve always wanted to cook. I’ve been cooking since I was 5 years old,” he said. “(I wanted) to show my kids that you can do whatever you want to do, regardless of your situation.”

“You are never too big or too old to follow your dreams.”

For low-income student parents, the grants have helped make it possible to balance child care costs with the demands of earning a degree. At Madison College, roughly 120 students have used CCAMPIS support to complete their degrees since 2018.

This semester, families of 34 children at Madison College were set to receive assistance through the program. At Western Technical College, roughly 100 students use grant funding for on-campus child care each year.

Now, colleges worry about how they’ll help those families without the federal money.

Madison College has offered on-campus child care since 1989 and has made three expansions to accommodate more student and employee parents. It opened a new $10 million facility this year. It also used the money to stock a “baby basic needs closet,” where students could take free diapers, formula, wipes and lactation supplies. The on-campus location allows some mothers to drop in between classes to breastfeed their children, campus child care administrator Donna Jost said. 

For community and technical colleges, these services — while difficult to provide and fund — are especially important. Their students are more likely to be parenting children than university students. Many colleges don’t track exactly how many of their students are parents, but Kari Reyburn, Western’s director of student life, equity and engagement, estimated that parents could account for as much as half of the student population at some technical colleges.

Student parents are particularly vulnerable to dropping out, Reyburn said. They perform well in their courses. But their responsibilities outside of school make it difficult to keep the momentum to finish their studies. 

“This is the type of student we serve as a community and technical college,” Reyburn said. “I just really feel like this is the lever. If you can figure out how to serve this group, remove these barriers and get them to completion, it means everything for our communities and their individual economic vitality.”

‘Plug has been pulled’

The funding loss could also affect colleges’ ability to expand child care services and strengthen the workforce that provides it.

Child care workers are hard to find because the job pays little and often doesn’t come with health care benefits. 

Western had plans to use the grant money for staff retention bonuses and to hire more students through apprenticeships and internships.  

“The plug has been pulled. Our students … are able to come to us and say, ‘Hey, I’m coming to Western because this is a resource you’re providing,’ and all of a sudden we have to go, ‘Sorry, we don’t have it,’ and we’re scrambling to find a solution in the interim,” Wallace said. “That’s the exponential challenge. They broke this continuity of service for a number of institutions across the nation.”

At Madison College, officials worry that losing the funding will make it harder to fill seats at the new child care center on the Goodman South campus. They hoped it would serve more low-income families in the area. Without the funding, they may have to rely more heavily on families who can afford to pay full price.

Madison College also had big hopes of piloting “sometimes child care” — a drop-in service for parents to leave their children for short periods while they take a test or talk to an adviser. 

“Without this funding, it’s going to be very difficult for us to move forward on that new programming,” Berne said. 

Milwaukee Area Technical College also operates a drop-in day care, where students can drop their children off for up to three hours while they complete school tasks. The kids play, do crafts or enjoy tummy time while their parents talk with tutors or attend school events. MATC hoped to use the CCAMPIS funds to subsidize this service and expand child care tuition assistance. 

“Without continued funding, student-parents face increased financial challenges and reduced access to the child care resources that help them remain enrolled, complete their programs, and achieve their educational and career goals,”  MATC Public Relations Director Darryll Fortune said in a statement.

Help wanted

In the meantime, the colleges are scrambling to help students pay their child care bills through private donations and other funding sources.

The Madison College Foundation gifted $30,000 to help the families cover 25% of costs this semester. It doesn’t compare to the roughly $300,000 in federal dollars they’ve gotten annually for the last four years, but it helps. College officials are also talking with legislators to explain the “difficult position we’re in,” Berne said. 

“If you want parents to better themselves to where they can make more money, to where they can buy more things, you have to give them the tools to be able to do so, not take those tools away,” Thomas said. 

If people with children can’t finish their schooling because of child care costs, “we’ll never have a community that is equitable, where everybody has access to the kinds of jobs (they want), and we won’t have a community that has people to fulfill the jobs that we need,” Berne said.  

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.

Federal child care funding loss leaves Wisconsin student parents scrambling to stay in 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.

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• More than 108,000 Wisconsinites are in default on student loans, according to federal data analyzed by the Associated Press and shared with Wisconsin Watch. 
• The number of borrowers in default surged nationwide since 2024, when pandemic relief measures ended. 
• Advocates expect it to worsen, with borrowers facing higher monthly payments and longer repayment terms after the Trump administration ended existing relief options.
• Wisconsin student loan borrowers who attend for-profit colleges are twice as likely to be 90 days behind on payments compared to peers at public and nonprofit private colleges, AP data shows.

The number of Wisconsinites many months behind on student loan bills has risen by nearly 50% since last fall. 

That’s according to federal data analyzed by the Associated Press, which found that more than 108,000 people in Wisconsin haven’t made payments on their loans in more than 360 days.

Across the country, the number of students in student loan default has surged by millions since a four-year pandemic reprieve ended in 2024, and advocates say it’s poised to worsen as President Donald Trump’s administration has ended existing relief options. 

Borrowers are placed in default after missing payments for nine months. The status triggers a raft of devastating consequences. The entire balance becomes due at once, and the loan is sent to collections, crashing the borrower’s credit score. That can make it harder to borrow, rent or even find work.  

Around 34,000 Wisconsinites entered student loan default since September 2025, the AP found. Of the roughly 709,100 people in Wisconsin who hold student loans, one in seven is currently in default.

Here’s how we got here: As a pandemic relief measure, the federal government allowed borrowers to suspend student loan payments until 2023, and President Joe Biden’s administration then provided a one-year grace period. That ended in fall 2024, allowing loans to enter into default after nine months of missed payments. 

A surge in defaults followed, and today around 9.5 million borrowers nationwide — over 1 in 5 — are in default, including those whose loans were well past due before the pandemic, according to the AP analysis. The previous record for borrowers in default had been 8 million in December 2019.

Meanwhile, many borrowers are facing much higher monthly payments since the Trump administration ended the SAVE repayment plan, which offered more flexibility and lower payments than any other. In its absence, borrowers will see longer repayment terms and “unpredictable payment spikes,” wrote Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access and Success, in a February blog post. 

“I am seeing despair and outrage and despondency and just a very wide mix of pretty extreme emotions, the likes of which I have not seen before,” Alan Collinge, the founder of grassroots advocacy group Student Loan Justice, told the AP. 

The federal government can garnish wages and Social Security payments from borrowers in default, but the Trump administration in January walked back plans to begin collections on their loans. A Moody’s Analytics report this spring said garnishments are likely to begin within the next year, warning of “an additional headwind in an increasingly fragile economy.” 

Governments and colleges may also impose additional penalties on borrowers in default, including restricting access to further financial aid, withholding transcripts and suspending professional licenses and driver’s licenses. 

“These measures are not only punitive, they’re also self-defeating: by undermining someone’s ability to cover basic expenses, return to school to finish a degree, keep their job, or even drive a car, the default system makes it harder for someone who is already struggling to secure their financial footing,” Zampini wrote in 2025. 

For-profit colleges, lower repayment rates

Students who attend Wisconsin’s for-profit colleges are far less likely to satisfy their loan payments than their peers at the state’s public and nonprofit private colleges, the AP data shows. 

AP reporters analyzed data from the Office of Federal Student Aid on students whose loan payments first came due between January 2020 and May 2025, typically because they either graduated or left school. The analysis does not include students at schools with fewer than 100 borrowers. 

The data shows students who have attended for-profit schools in Wisconsin are twice as likely as their peers to be at least 90 days behind on payments. At Wisconsin’s public and private colleges, one in seven of these borrowers had fallen behind on payments by May of this year. At for-profit schools, the rate was more than one in four. 

Nonpayment rates were highest for students who attended for-profit cosmetology schools.

Nearly half of the 300 borrowers in the sample who attended Tricoci University of Beauty Culture’s Janesville campus were at least 90 days late. 

The Paul Mitchell beauty schools in Madison — which has since closed — and Milwaukee have 40% nonpayment rates. The nonpayment rate for the Salon Professional Academy in Kenosha is 36%, and the rate at State College of Beauty Culture is 35%.

Elinor Mittlestat, owner of State College of Beauty Culture, found the nonpayment rate surprising. She noted that many people graduate from the school without any loans. 

“It has been a strained economy, and I do understand that newly graduated students sometimes struggle to make student loan payments,” she said. 

One reason for the low repayment rate could be that cosmetology graduates tend to have relatively low incomes. On average, graduates of the Paul Mitchell school in Milwaukee, the Salon Professional Academy in Kenosha and State College of Beauty Culture make $7,000 to $12,500 less than the median Wisconsin high school graduate, according to an analysis of earnings data from Open Campus and The HEA Group.

Meanwhile, student borrowers who don’t finish school have to make loan payments too, even though they don’t have a credential to help them get a better job. Those who don’t graduate 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,” Carole Trone, executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition on Student Debt, told Wisconsin Watch in January. 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.”

Around 25,000 students who recently attended Wisconsin public colleges are at least 90 days behind on their payments too, though they represent a far smaller share (13%) of those borrowers.

Students who attended Gateway Technical College have the highest nonpayment rate of the state’s public schools, with three in 10 recent students not making payments. 

Gateway communications manager Lee Colony said the college needs to use a “personal touch” to see what’s driving people to not pay their loans.

“We will reach out to those students and see if there is any help we can provide to them for repayment options,” Colony said. “Some of that outreach will also include ways to educate them on finances and how to properly borrow money to pay for college.”

By comparison, the University of Wisconsin campuses in Oshkosh, Stevens Point, Superior and Whitewater all have nonpayment rates of 10%, while UW-Madison’s rate is just 3%. At all of those schools, most students receive some form of financial aid besides loans.

Nationwide, AP’s analysis found 133 schools where more than half of recent students are at least 90 days behind on payments. Nearly all of them are for-profit schools, and more than half of them are barber or beauty schools.

This story was reported in collaboration with The Associated Press through its Localize It initiative, which provides datasets, reporting and story ideas for local newsrooms.

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Find her on Instagram and Twitter, or send her an email at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.

Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org. 

Student loan defaults surge in Wisconsin, US after federal reprieve ends 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.