After years of struggling with declining enrollment, Alverno College changed its recruitment strategy with a renewed focus on athletics — and it’s starting to work.
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The first sign seemed harmless.
Bill Ducett drove his carload of friends in the opposite direction of the Chicago conference where they were headed. His wife Diana — a nurse — watched out the car window, concerned, as they passed unfamiliar streets. When she corrected Bill, embarrassment washed over him as he quickly turned the car around.
It was a small slipup, unless you know Bill: a 78-year-old with a razor-sharp internal compass and an Illinois native who knows the city like the back of his hand.
Diana convinced Bill to go to the doctor. After five hours of testing, he emerged with a diagnosis: mild cognitive impairment, and a prescription: car GPS.
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Now, for three years, Bill has met with medical students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about what it’s like to live with an early-stage Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
The program, dubbed New Friends, has for 14 years connected people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia with future medical professionals to learn from one another.
The goal is to teach future health care workers lessons they can’t gain from coursework alone: firsthand experience with people living with cognitive changes outside of a classroom and textbook. Many of the participating students go on to be nurses, doctors, therapists or social workers. Together, they help challenge misconceptions about dementia and work toward better care for patients experiencing it.
“I thought I could be, with my own journey, helping to be productive for somebody else to do something about this. So the motivation was to give back. But in giving back, I’m getting so many benefits,” Bill said.
As Wisconsin’s population ages, elder care workers are in short supply, and even rarer are those with prior experience with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The arrangement is mutually beneficial: Students get experience connecting with people living with cognitive changes, and mentors get social connection during a particularly lonely time.
“Oftentimes medical students are really good at the medicine side of things, but their bedside manner or their understanding of people living with dementia wasn’t the best,” said Sheryl Spensley, education coordinator at UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
The program started small in 2012. Since then, it’s grown exponentially, and more than 300 students have participated. Usually, each mentor takes on two students.
Spensley plays matchmaker, pairing students and mentors who have the most in common.
The meetups look different for every pair. Some gather at the mentor’s home to sit and talk. Others go to parks, coffee shops, restaurants or museums. Some opt for more activity, watching sports, going bowling or playing board games. Bill and Diana’s “friends” have chosen to paint pottery together or attend plays put on by Bill’s son, a teacher at their local school in Oregon, Wisconsin.
There are logistics to navigate that students usually don’t consider in their everyday lives: How will the mentor get to the meeting? Is there suitable parking and seating? Is the meeting place too loud or overstimulating?
“That’s a good learning experience about how differently abled people have to navigate the world, capacity to get in and out of places, and how much time that takes for people,” Spensley said.
All mentors are squarely in the early stages of dementia. In the mid to late stages, communication becomes more challenging, people may live in an assisted living facility, and reflecting on what they’re experiencing can be difficult.
“For some it can be more emotionally distressing at that point,” said Molly Schroeder, outreach program manager at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute who helps coordinate New Friends.
Much of the conversation can tend to revolve around the mentor, as students ask about things like the logistics of their medical care or their everyday hurdles, but former mentee Meghana Ram said they also often just talked as friends. She found the meetups felt less like an interview and more like a social hangout.
Some of the mentors have caregivers who join and talk about their responsibilities and careers. Technically, Diana joins the meetings as Bill’s mentor.
“She’s a caregiver, but you know, she’s more of a commentator,” Bill joked.
Throughout the semester-long process, students keep a journal where they reflect on what their mentors teach them. They also take surveys before and after the program measuring their attitudes toward people with cognitive decline — questions like, “how comfortable would you be sitting one on one with someone with dementia?” By the end, students’ perceptions grow more positive.
When Bill started telling his neighbors and friends about his diagnosis, he felt their sympathy. But he also noticed that they became uncomfortable and started “pulling back” from him.
“They don’t know what to say,” Diana said of people who learn about Bill’s diagnosis. “They’re afraid of how they’ll be interpreted … They feel sorry for both of us. They’re a little too afraid to get involved.”
Nowadays, the symptoms Bill experiences are small and often harmless: forgetting that he made a cup of coffee for Diana until the cup is cooled. Temporarily losing his keen sense of direction. But he still drives, still attends his son’s plays, still lives his life mostly as normal.
During dementia’s early stages, people often experience confusion or small memory lapses that don’t always impact their ability to live independently. Many with this early diagnosis still have jobs and social lives and are raising kids or grandkids, Schroeder said.
But many people don’t realize that, she said, “because unfortunately, a lot of what we see in the media is, we see people more at the later stages in a nursing home, sitting in a wheelchair in front of a TV. But there are years before that where it doesn’t look like that at all.”
Bill doesn’t feel that same judgment with the New Friends students. They meet him with pure curiosity. He’s mentored eight students over three years.
“I was a school teacher. I was a professor in education. I mentored students in their 20s,” Bill said. “So I meet with these future medical professionals because I can get back in teaching mode. For me, it’s all very comfortable.”
Students say the program dispels many of the myths about dementia they once held, mostly regarding what someone’s daily life must look like after diagnosis.
“Culturally, how we look at the elderly, it’s not good,” Spensley said. “This program shows students that even when you have early-stage dementia, you still have things to contribute to society and things you can learn. That’s why they’re called mentors.”
When Ram worked as a CNA at an assisted living facility throughout high school, she kept meeting dementia patients, and she didn’t feel she had the tools to fully connect with them.
After enrolling at UW-Madison, she joined the New Friends program to improve her communication with patients.
For a year, she set aside time to play at an arcade and go out to eat with her mentors. She asked questions like: “How did you react to the diagnosis? How did you tell your family? Has your social life changed?”
The answers showed her the importance of establishing a personal connection with patients.
“A lot of these patients don’t necessarily have someone to talk to or have someone to listen to them,” Ram said. “By doing that, you can learn so much of what each individual person needs … to make them feel better. Realizing that the experience of this illness looks so different from person to person, and that sometimes it needs a tailored approach, and that only comes with building that trust and having those conversations and listening.”
Ram loved the program so much that when she moved home to Green Bay, she started a mini version with local students.
The program ran for two years in partnership with Curative Connections, a support program for adults with dementia or other cognitive issues. It ended when Ram moved to Wausau to study to become a physician’s assistant. But she hopes to restart something similar someday.
“(I wanted to) go into those patient rooms with better communication methods, or remembering more of the experience, not only for me, but for the patient, too, and maybe for family members,” Ram said. “I think understanding the experience of a disease is so much more different than just a textbook definition of it. Getting to hear that from patients firsthand is really neat.”
Like Ram, not every student will go on to become a caregiver for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. But they’ll be prepared when coming across people with cognitive changes, whether they be patients, family members or perfect strangers.
“Whether that’s at a restaurant, a bank, the grocery store,” Schroeder said, “it’s important to know how to communicate and support those individuals.”
But it isn’t just about preparing students for the people they’ll meet in the future.
Many of the New Friends pairs end up forming a bond and keep in touch after their time in the program ends. Ram said she and her mentors kept in touch for a while by texting each other photos and updates about their lives. Bill and Diana follow where their students go after graduation and look forward to meeting more, semester after semester.
“We feel that those young people have enriched our lives so much,” Diana said. “They keep us looking forward to the next set of friends.”
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.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
How Alzheimer’s and dementia patients teach Wisconsin’s next generation of health care workers 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.
On a sunny morning in late August, a dozen teenagers wearing reflective vests and work boots stand on a hill overlooking the farm fields of their central Wisconsin college.
A few steps away is the classroom where they’ll learn how electricity works. Beside it, a handful of poles six stories tall mark the training yard where they’ll train to install and repair power lines, a skill that’s increasingly in need as Wisconsin’s infrastructure ages and data centers demand ever more energy.
Today, they’ll try out some of the toughest physical parts of the job — while racing against the clock.
The students have just 30 minutes to dig a hole 4 feet deep and 2 feet wide. Then they must walk two 100-pound wooden pole chunks down the school’s dirt road and haul a 70-pound piece of wood up a 65-foot pole twice, using only a pulley and their own strength. The student who finishes in the shortest time wins.
This is day three of the nine-month Electrical Power Distribution Program at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, which prepares about 14 students each year for careers with electric utilities or power line construction companies.
It’s one of seven such programs at the state’s tech colleges, which together enrolled 265 students in 2025.
With a median salary of more than $95,000, electrical line work is one of the country’s most lucrative jobs for people without a college degree. It can also be dangerous and draining, as it often involves long days of manual labor, as well as exposure to the elements, heights and thousands of volts of power.
Most of the students in this class were still in high school just a few months ago. By the end of September, they’d begun scaling utility poles six stories tall. Within a year, they could land apprenticeships that pay more than $34 an hour and put them on track to earn union pensions.
It’s instructor Marc Cegielski’s job to make sure they’re ready.
“It is physically demanding. It is mentally demanding, and your work-life balance is probably not going to be very good — unless you want your work-life balance to be more work than not work,” said Cegielski, who spent four years doing line work before he started teaching. He still works as a lineman for several weeks each summer to keep his skill sharp.
The field of electrical line work is thriving. The country is expected to add 13,600 line worker jobs between 2025 and 2035, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a jump of 10%, much faster than the average for all jobs. In Wisconsin, the ranks are expected to swell nearly 14% from 2024 to 2034, with about 240 job openings projected each year. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2150, which represents line workers and a variety of other workers in Wisconsin, reports its membership is at an all-time high.
One reason for that growth: the explosion of artificial intelligence.
While the data centers that provide the computing power for all that AI tend to employ relatively few people once they’re up and running, constructing them takes a lot of labor. And it’s not just the work of building the data centers themselves. Hyperscale data centers, designed to be able to scale up their computing power as needed, will need massive amounts of electricity to power their computers, and Wisconsin will need to expand and update its electrical grid to meet the demand. Wisconsin’s first hyperscale data center opened in Mount Pleasant this summer, and others are under construction in Beaver Dam and Port Washington. Proposals for additional centers are under review in other communities, including Kenosha and Wisconsin Rapids.
The new energy demand comes at a time when states finally have the money to strengthen and expand aging electric grids, thanks to the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in 2021. Those funds could help Wisconsin’s electrical infrastructure accommodate more energy sources and rebound more quickly after storms, changes proponents say are needed whether or not the state adds more data centers.
Meanwhile, line workers, like many other tradespeople, have been in increasingly short supply as Wisconsin’s workforce shrinks.
“There’s never been a better time to get involved in this trade, and the work outlook right here at home in Wisconsin looks awesome for the next 10-plus years,” said IBEW Local 2150 business manager Jim Meyer.
Installing and maintaining power lines is rewarding work, Cegielski said, because workers can see the difference they’re making. Sometimes they turn the lights back on after a storm. And sometimes, they bring electricity to a place that’s never had it, as he and a few students do each spring on the Navajo Reservation.
“Getting people’s electricity back feels really good,” Cegielski said.
But the job isn’t for everyone.
Line work involves heavy exertion in all kinds of weather. Machines can handle the tough tasks some of the time, but Cegielski warns his students there are plenty of times when they’ll need to dig or lift by hand because no machine is available, or it’d be too hard to maneuver the machinery — say, in a residential backyard. Plus, if there are buried utilities within 18 inches, mechanical digging is prohibited.
“You can’t always use a machine. Sometimes you’re the machine,” Cegielski tells his students as they race to dig their holes. He says he’s sometimes spent a whole day digging a single hole, with or without a machine to help.
The students wipe their brows. One slips off his gloves. Cegielski urges them on. “Come on, man. The customer needs their electricity back.”
With four minutes left on the clock, Sam Volm, 18, unfolds a ruler to check his progress.
“I’m only about 2 feet deep! This is so crazy,” he says. He’s not alone. None of the holes are nearly deep enough.
It’s just one example of the challenges of the job. Some line workers work for contractors hired by utility companies to build or maintain their infrastructure. Those workers could be on the road, often out of state, for weeks or months at a time. Line workers employed by local utility companies generally work close to home. Still, many work 12- to 16-hour shifts, and they may need to be available to help on nights or weekends.
“Your phone rings a lot,” Cegielski said. “You’re going to be missing a lot of things that you’d rather be doing with your friends and your family to answer that phone call and get people’s power back on so that they can cook supper, so that they can go to work and earn money for their own families.”
And then there are the safety concerns. Cegielski said he’s never been seriously injured doing line work, but he knows the risks that come from working with high voltage and at high heights, sometimes on busy roads. Electrical power line installers and repairers had the 16th highest fatal injury rate of all U.S. jobs, with an annual rate of around 24 fatalities and 189 nonfatal injuries per 100,000 workers, according to a USA Today analysis of federal data from 2020 and 2021.
Despite the challenges of the job, the training program at Northcentral Technical College consistently has a waitlist.
For Volm, who’s worked in construction since he was 14, spending his days outside was part of the appeal.
“You’re not behind a computer or nothing. It’s real physical work, it’s what I’m used to,” Volm said.
His dad, an electrician, encouraged him to consider line work. Bigger lines mean bigger money, he said, plus he’d get to travel.
The morning drill didn’t deter him. He’s been wrestling since first grade, so he’s got lots of practice putting his body to the test.
“It was pretty tough, but I muscled through it, obviously, and embraced the suck.”
Training programs like these are an optional extra step for those looking to enter the field. Line workers get most of their training through apprenticeships that last three to six years and require only a high school diploma. But doing a program like the one at Northcentral Tech first gives students a chance to try out the work before they commit.
That’s how Pat Keegan, a business agent with IBEW Local 2150, got started in the industry 25 years ago.
“I’m glad I did it because I got comfortable with climbing and I knew I wanted to do this career,” Keegan said, though plenty of line workers go straight into apprenticeships.
“I’ve seen people right out of high school, skip the tech school part of it … and have no issues,” Keegan said.
Prospective line workers shouldn’t assume this training will help them get an apprenticeship faster, Meyer said. Instead, they should think of it as a chance to solidify their skills and learn more about things like electrical theory.
For Cegielski, the Northcentral Tech program is also about teaching the all-important “soft skills” that employers are increasingly looking for, like how to solve problems and persevere through challenges.
Take the August morning’s drill. What the students don’t know is that Cegielski designed the digging portion to be nearly impossible within the time limit.
“I like to observe to see, once they figure out they’re running out of time, do they continue trying, or do they give up? It’s a really good marker of character,” Cegielski said. “Even if they don’t think they can complete the task, they should keep going at it.”
Six other Wisconsin tech colleges offer electrical power distribution programs, but capacity is limited. Graduates earn around $43,000 more a year than the median high school graduate, according to an analysis of earnings data from three of the programs, conducted by Open Campus and The HEA Group. Program cost varies by school but typically runs from $8,500 to $11,000.
Despite the growing demand for line workers, Northcentral Technical College hasn’t expanded its small program. Cegielski says he hasn’t heard anything about plans to do so.
“They need more people than I can provide,” Cegielski said, “and I don’t see that changing anytime in the near future … I don’t know if that’s a problem that the technical college system wants to handle or can even handle.”
Leaders at Northcentral Technical College did not respond to a request for comment.
Kristina Haensgen, a spokesperson for Moraine Park Technical College, which also trains future line workers, noted the “strong and ongoing demand for skilled electrical line workers” but said the school has no immediate plans to grow its program.
Chippewa Valley Technical College, Milwaukee Area Technical College and Southwest Wisconsin Technical College did not offer comment on their line worker training programs.
If colleges do want to expand these programs, the booming industry might actually make it tougher, said Katy Pettersen, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Technical Colleges System.
“We have not heard much on this front, other than colleges may be having trouble finding qualified instructors because the companies building the data centers are paying so well.”
Meyer of IBEW Local 2150 said the number of apprenticeships available through his union depends on how much local employers are hiring. In a good year, there could be room for around 170 new apprentices, he said, and it looks like Wisconsin is on track for some good years. Those waiting for an apprenticeship can get jobs as “groundmen” assisting line-working crews until a spot opens.
Cegielski talks with many of his former students, and he doesn’t think any of them are struggling to find work.
That stands in contrast to many other fields, where AI has left many uncertain about the future. Recent college graduates with four-year degrees are having more trouble finding jobs. Across the country, office workers are wondering if they’ll be replaced by increasingly powerful AI agents, or if they’ll have the skills they’ll need to use ever-more-ubiquitous AI tools.
“At the moment, it doesn’t seem like AI is knocking at our door to take our jobs,” Cegielski said with a laugh. ”(The work) is hands-on, and it doesn’t look like machines and robots are going to be able to take it in the future. Maybe someday.”
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
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As data centers test Wisconsin’s electrical grid, job opportunities flourish 60 feet in the air 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.
Francis Halzen was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work pioneering neutrino astronomy.
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A rally scheduled for Friday evening aims to allow sexual assault survivors to share their stories and demand change from UW-Madison and the city to prevent sexual violence. The organizer tells WPR proceeds will support the RCC Sexual Violence Resource Center.
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Ten assistance-dogs-in-training — yellow Labrador retrievers — are living in dorms, attending classes and experiencing life alongside 22 student trainers at UW-River Falls.
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New credential programs and apprenticeships are creating more pathways for Wisconsin workers to launch careers, switch fields and build skills throughout their working lives.
But Wisconsin policymakers could do more to make those pathways accessible to students and workers.
Those were among the themes from a conversation Wisconsin Watch and Open Campus convened Tuesday to explore how short-term credentials are reshaping careers in a range of industries — from manufacturing to health care and education.
Here are four more takeaways from the event’s two panels, which were moderated by Wisconsin Watch/Open Campus reporters Natalie Yahr and Miranda Dunlap.
Panelists said workers increasingly can build skills over time through short-term credentials, apprenticeships and certificates. Wisconsin Technical College System President Layla Merrifield compared the “stackable” approach to constructing a Lego city — adding one building at a time as careers evolve.
“It’s OK to change careers. It’s OK to change your mind,” she said, encouraging students and workers to view education as a lifelong process rather than a one-time decision.
Nathan Roberts, president and owner of G.D. Roberts, a metal manufacturer in Columbus, Wisconsin, encouraged students and early-career workers to take their time, try new things and gravitate toward what gives them joy.
Parents should be patient, too.
“Give your kids enough time to figure it out,” he said.
Knowing how to weld, code or care for patients may open the door to a profession, panelists said, but employers increasingly look for workers who can communicate, collaborate, manage projects and solve problems. Credentialing programs through technical colleges often teach those “employability” skills alongside the industry basics, Merrifield said.
That’s one reason why Roberts said he values candidates who have pursued credentials through technical colleges or adjacent institutions.
“It’s not about the morsels that they learn as much as the process you go through,” he said. “We want to know that you’re trainable. That you’re a team member. That you’re a problem solver.”
Those skills, Roberts said, are hard to find.
Apprenticeships aren’t limited to construction and manufacturing.
“Earn-and-learn” programs have expanded into fields including health care, education, barbering, urban forestry and cosmetology, Merrifield said. Certified nursing assistant and EMT credentialing programs are particularly popular at community colleges.
“If they want to go into health care … that is a true stackable credential industry,” said Becky Kikkert, development director for the Workforce Development Board of South Central Wisconsin.
Since 2018 UW Health in Madison has been paying employees to gain credentials for careers as nurses, surgical techs or other positions — while they are working.
Kermit Kaleba, strategy director for credentials of value at the Lumina Foundation, noted that states have invested a combined $4.5 billion in career and technical education to date, much of it since the pandemic. But Wisconsin remains one of five states without dedicated funding for career and technical education in public schools, leaving access to many programs dependent on local school district budgets.
Merrifield noted Wisconsin is one of just three states that do not provide dedicated funding for dual enrollment in high schools and technical colleges.
Merrifield said Wisconsin needs a broader conversation about what school is for — and what it isn’t.
The goal, she said, is to build a system that lets people return to learning — whether they’re 18, 38 or 48 — whenever their careers demand new skills.
“Your path is rarely as clear or as linear as you might assume. There are many on-ramps and off-ramps … There are so many opportunities,” she said. “There are so many options.”
Disclosure: The Lumina Foundation, Ascendium Education Group and the Joyce Foundation are Wisconsin Watch funders but have no control over its editorial decisions. A list of donors and funders through 2025, as well as our donation acceptance policies, can be found here. Ascendium and the Joyce Foundation sponsored Tuesday’s event.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
How new credentials are reshaping career pathways in Wisconsin 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.
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of physics Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that researchers believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.
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The primate research conducted at UW-Madison’s Harlow Lab and Wisconsin National Primate Research Center has been the subject of controversy for many years.
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Read More from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Quad Recycling Containers
Police have arrested at least two men amid an investigation into alleged hazing in the basement of an unrecognized fraternity near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
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A plan to build homes and multifamily units on the site of a closed college campus in Waukesha is moving forward.
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The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has its highest enrollment in 17 years, with first year student enrollment up nearly 1 percent and transfer enrollment up 4.5 percent.
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Editor’s note: This story was produced with financial support from the Education Writers Association’s Reporting Fellowship program.
Jaidyn Glaus was sitting in her English class at Durand-Arkansaw Middle & High School last fall when she was called to the principal’s office. She had no idea why.
The Pepin County school’s principal and guidance counselor had news: Thanks to her high grades, Glaus qualified for a new program called the Wisconsin Guarantee, automatically granting her a spot at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after graduation.
Glaus had never heard of the program. “It came really as a surprise,” she said.
A few weeks ago, Glaus moved into Smith Residence Hall and started classes at UW-Madison as part of the second group of students to enroll through the Wisconsin Guarantee.
State lawmakers created the program in 2024, believing automatic acceptance for top high schoolers would make the admissions process less cryptic and help ensure the state’s “best and brightest” attend Wisconsin’s 13 public universities, with a particular focus on Madison. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed the bill into law as one of 16 conditions in a controversial 2023 deal struck between Republican legislators and UW system leaders.
Under the law, students in the top 5% of their high school class are guaranteed admission at UW-Madison if they apply by an early deadline. All other UW campuses automatically accept students in the top 10% if they apply by a regular deadline. Homeschool students may also qualify depending on their ACT score, and National Merit finalists receive automatic admission to all the state’s public universities.
To provide a comprehensive first look at the program, the Cap Times spoke with about 40 people, including students, school administrators and researchers. While most people agreed with the Wisconsin Guarantee’s aspirations and believe it has reduced anxiety for some students, views were more mixed on how the program is affecting admissions.
The policy has raised concerns about fairness in college admissions as school districts rank students differently. Some administrators worry it places too great an emphasis on grades, which don’t necessarily capture the rigor of students’ coursework. The program is also prompting some students to view Wisconsin’s flagship as a “safety school” and apply to more competitive universities out of state — contrary to what lawmakers intended.
The majority of those interviewed doubt the Wisconsin Guarantee is making a substantial difference in who applies and enrolls at UW-Madison.
A research paper exclusively obtained by the Cap Times supports that view. The study, which has not yet been published, examined a decade’s worth of UW-Madison admissions data and estimates the Wisconsin Guarantee generated about 240 more applications annually from traditional public high schools — or a sliver of the roughly 75,000 applications UW-Madison has received in recent years.
About 95% of students who received the guarantee would’ve likely been admitted to UW-Madison anyway through its standard admissions process, the research also estimates. That rate would mean the guarantee changed admissions outcomes for about 50 students from public high schools each year.
“I hope that students eligible for the guarantee apply,” said Heather Little, a UW-Madison Ph.D. student who authored the working research paper. “And then for students who aren’t eligible for the guarantee, I don’t think you should be deterred because … there’s still a huge chance that you can be admitted.”
The long-term effects of the guarantee remain to be seen, though researchers questioned if the program will keep high-achieving students in the state. While some said the program could theoretically help rural or first-generation students access UW-Madison, others raised concern that the university’s student body could become less diverse.
The guarantee is another example in Wisconsin’s long history of implementing higher education policies that have “very little” evidentiary support and documented unintended consequences, said Taylor Odle, a UW-Madison assistant professor of education policy studies.
“This is a policy that’s well intentioned, that’s kind of mistargeted. … And it has no teeth,” Odle said.
During a public hearing at the state Capitol three years ago, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Fox Crossing, held up a thick document Republican legislators received from UW-Madison about its admissions process.
Cabral-Guevara paged through the document, revealing most of the contents were redacted. She shared how one high-achieving student in her district had approached her seeking answers after UW-Madison rejected their application. Cabral-Guevara said she couldn’t explain why.
The senator then raised doubts about UW-Madison’s standard admissions process, known as holistic admissions, in which the university evaluates students using a variety of factors, such as grades, course difficulty, extracurriculars and essays.
Citing her time teaching at UW-Oshkosh, Cabral-Guevara said she observed firsthand how holistic admissions could be “manipulated” to benefit one student over another.
“The public doesn’t even really know what it takes to get into the UW system,” she said. “We have many highly qualified students that are rejected every single day, and, in turn, they take up admission into other colleges and universities that might be out of our state.”
Wisconsin-born adults who move to other states tend to be more highly educated than residents who stay in the state or others who move here, according to a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report.
“The bottom line is that we are losing too many of our ‘best and brightest’ high school graduates to neighboring colleges and universities,” Rep. Jerry O’Connor, R-Fond du Lac, said in written testimony. “Is this not a form of institutionalized brain drain?”
The solution proposed by Cabral-Guevara and her co-authors was a bill to automatically admit students who rank at the top of their high school classes based on criteria developed by local school districts.
The bill garnered praise from some Republicans at the hearing, including Rep. Dave Murphy, of Hortonville, who chairs the Assembly’s higher education committee. Murphy said he knew a high-achieving white student in the top of their class who didn’t get into UW-Madison and ended up going to the University of Minnesota.
“The bill could be labeled as an anti-DEI bill,” O’Connor added. “And I’ll just say, I don’t care about DEI in this situation. This is simply about not discriminating against the best of the best coming out of our high schools.”
UW-Madison and UW system representatives expressed concern in written testimonies about the bill, saying the state’s public universities were already accomplishing the bill’s intent of keeping high-achieving students in Wisconsin.
UW-Madison defended holistic admissions as the best way to acknowledge differences in resources and educational opportunities across high schools with “the desire to capture wide representation from talented and impressive graduates from all 72 Wisconsin counties.”
The university noted the bill would require K-12 schools to rank students and that many schools used different methods to calculate GPA, a scale that converts letter grades into numbers. A majority of applicants didn’t have class rankings on their transcripts at all, the university said.
“To be clear, this is not an impossible change,” UW-Madison wrote. “But it is more complicated than it might appear and one that deserves very careful consideration of the costs as well as the benefits.”
The final legislation signed by Evers required all high schools to use GPA as the “sole criterion” for ranking students.
At the time, it was unclear why the automatic admissions policy was included in a wide-ranging deal between Republicans and the UW system, which largely centered around cutting diversity-related positions and programs in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the UW system.
In a recent interview with the Cap Times, Murphy said he was involved in some talks over the deal and Republican leaders included the policy to avoid a potential veto from Evers.
“That bill probably wouldn’t have been signed by Gov. Evers otherwise without getting it into some kind of a package to make that work,” Murphy said.
A spokesperson for Evers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A few months after the bill was signed into law in 2024, the first group of Wisconsin Guarantee recipients received notice from their high schools that they were automatically admitted based on their class rank at the end of their junior year.
Over a quarter of in-state students who enrolled at UW-Madison last fall received admission through the program. Public data on the second cohort, who started classes a few weeks ago, isn’t yet available.
The Cap Times spoke with students and school administrators from nearly 20 districts across the state, including high schools that historically send a lot of students to UW-Madison and some that don’t. They largely agreed the guarantee hasn’t been a significant factor in students deciding to go to UW-Madison, but it relieved some pressure in the application process.
“I still had to do all of the work,” said Elise Hendrickson, a Neenah High School graduate who received the guarantee and is now a sophomore at UW-Madison. “It’s just that I didn’t have to feel as stressed about like, ‘Oh, am I going to get in or not?’”
While the guarantee strengthened some high-achieving students’ confidence in attending UW-Madison, it nudged others to look outside the state.
“Some of our families, the kids will get the guarantee, and then they will shoot for the most selective schools in the country,” said Zach Galin, founder of the college admissions consulting firm Galin Education. “And if they don’t get in, they know they have this guarantee to go to UW-Madison. … They’re much more willing to apply broadly and see where the chips fall before making any decisions.”
That’s the calculus Lauren Alibali made. Shortly after the Madison West High School senior received the guarantee last fall, she met a friend at Indie Coffee on Regent Street. Alibali considered only applying to UW-Madison because she thought it would be easier.
But Alibali’s friend pushed back, reminding her of all the hard work she’d put in to qualify for the guarantee and be at the top of her class. Why not try to get into the country’s most prestigious schools?
Knowing she had “an awesome safety school” with UW-Madison, Alibali applied to Ivy League schools and other universities she considered to be a reach. Then she got into and decided to attend the University of Chicago.
“I don’t know if the opportunity of Chicago would present itself again,” she said.
Many school officials and students who spoke with the Cap Times had mixed feelings on whether the guarantee’s benefits outweigh its side effects.
Some school counselors and principals worried the program placed too great of a focus on grades alone. They felt the policy created unnecessary pressure for already stressed students to be at the top — even though many would still be well positioned for admission to UW-Madison without the guarantee.
“Whenever you have a rank, it’s a competition. Let’s be honest. And unfortunately, it pits students and families against each other at a very hard time,” said Deanne Lensert, principal of Waunakee Community High School. “We’ve definitely seen that as an unintended consequence.”
Stephen Trudeau, the high school principal of Durand-Arkansaw Middle & High School, feels torn. Growing up in a blue-collar family in Minnesota, he said college wasn’t often talked about as an option for him.
“I came from a small school. I didn’t have those types of opportunities,” he said, “so I think anytime we can create opportunities for kids to see pathways to these institutions and see themselves there, I think that’s really important.”
Still, Trudeau felt conflicted about promoting the program to his students because of the focus on rankings and grades. He knows some students may be ranked lower because they took more challenging coursework.
“Anytime we start talking rank and we start talking percentages … there becomes a game that gets played, right?” he said. “I think sometimes we lose the value of education. Are we learning for the purpose of learning, or are we learning for the purpose of some sort of external motivator or some sort of extrinsic award, such as … the guarantee?”
That’s part of why Trudeau waited to talk to top students about the guarantee until after they’d already qualified. That included Glaus, who started attending UW-Madison this fall.
Others worry the program is unfair. Vanessa Ivanov, who graduated from UW-Madison in December, has a little sister who wanted to follow in her footsteps as a Badger — but she missed the top 5% cutoff at Germantown High School by one spot. She wasn’t admitted through holistic admissions, either.
“She is very disappointed,” Ivanov said. “She ended up at UW-Milwaukee, which … is still a great school. But she looks at a lot of her classmates and the opportunities that they’re being given here at (UW-Madison), and she does not really view it as being fair or being equitable.”
Some high schools use unweighted GPAs, which award equal points for all courses regardless of difficulty. Weighted GPAs give more points for more challenging classes like Advanced Placement and honors classes.
“This program and not requiring that schools weigh their GPA puts a significant disadvantage for those who are actually taking those college preparatory classes and working to put themselves in a position where they’d be perhaps more able to succeed in that higher education environment,” Ivanov said.
Debate over weighted GPAs in response to the Wisconsin Guarantee continues to play out at certain high schools, especially those that typically send a greater share of students to UW-Madison. For some school districts with unweighted GPAs or that use other ranking systems, ties have emerged among the top students.
Representatives from some districts that have created tiebreakers or reworked GPA systems said the guarantee has sparked a lot of conversation — and stress — in their communities.
“We didn’t create the law, we didn’t create the rules, and we had no voice in the creation of the guidance,” said Curt Mould, director of digital media, innovation and strategy for the Sun Prairie Area School District. “But yet we’re on the hook for implementing. … It was never really explained to (school) systems why this was necessary.”
As state lawmakers passed the Wisconsin Guarantee in 2024, policymakers in New York and elsewhere were eyeing top-percent admissions plans in response to a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning race-conscious admissions.
Top-percent admissions plans originated in the 1990s following state-level affirmative action bans in places like Texas, Florida and California. Because most students attend schools close to their homes and because neighborhoods often are racially divided, policymakers hoped top-percent plans would help maintain diversity at selective public universities since the same proportion of top students at every high school receives automatic admission.
However, studies have largely found top-percent admissions programs have minimal effects on enrollment patterns in the long term and fall short of meaningfully changing which high schools send students to selective public universities.
The new paper by Little, the UW-Madison Ph.D. student, builds on that body of research by studying Wisconsin’s new top-percent policy.
Through a data partnership between UW-Madison’s Division of Enrollment Management and the Student Success Through Applied Research Lab, Little compiled application data from over 800 traditional public high schools in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Minnesota schools served as a control group since Minnesota students receive tuition reciprocity but are ineligible for the guarantee.
Little’s findings suggest shortcomings in the Wisconsin Guarantee’s ability to persuade the state’s “best and brightest” to stay. She estimates just half of all guarantee-eligible students applied to UW-Madison, and top 5% students were less likely to enroll than applicants who were admitted through holistic admissions.
For students who received the guarantee but didn’t apply, it’s unclear where they landed after graduating high school. An informal survey Little conducted of high school counselors indicated the guarantee wasn’t a significant factor in students’ college decisions. Sixteen counselors who provided written responses pointed to factors like cost, geography and proximity to home as driving students’ decisions.
Little found the “rare” students whose applications likely received a “significant admissions boost” from the guarantee were those with high academic performance but less difficult classes. However, Little said it isn’t possible with the available data to determine whether certain students who just missed obtaining the guarantee were hurt by the program.
“The students who are more likely to be hurt by the policy are kind of like the last admit from these (schools that) were sending lots of people before,” Little said. “I don’t have any evidence of that … but that’s what economic theory would tell us.”
Little’s survey of high school counselors and written responses from about two dozen UW-Madison freshmen revealed conflicting sentiments about the guarantee. She said people who feel well served by the holistic admissions process may think the new program is unnecessary, while others who perceive admissions as opaque may appreciate the benefits.
“How you feel about the policy depends on how well you think holistic admissions is working,” she said.
Administrators at UW-Madison and the UW system said it’s too early to know the effects of the Wisconsin Guarantee. Johannes Britz, the UW system’s senior vice president for academic and student affairs, said it could take years to get a clearer picture.
However, the UW system said it’s not tracking how many students have enrolled through the program. It’s also unclear how many high school students have qualified for the program, regardless of whether they later applied to a state university. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction isn’t tracking that data, said John Johnson, a senior policy adviser for the state agency.
Murphy, the Republican lawmaker from Hortonville, said he has received fewer phone calls from parents complaining their child wasn’t admitted to UW-Madison with the guarantee in place. He previously fielded dozens of calls on this topic in any given legislative term, he said.
More transparency around UW-Madison’s admissions is still needed, he said, but the guarantee makes the UW admissions process better.
Cabral-Guevara called the guarantee “a critical first step in ensuring that Wisconsin’s best and brightest students are given a spot on our campuses.”
“As with any new program, I am happy to work with folks on ways to make improvements so that we can continue on the progress we’ve made so far,” she said in a statement.
Researchers who’ve examined top-percent programs elsewhere expressed surprise at the approach and policy aims outlined in Wisconsin’s guaranteed admissions law — as well as skepticism that it would achieve its goals.
“Most of the percentage plans have come out of a desire to increase racial diversity in a way that doesn’t explicitly use race in the process,” said Daniel Klasik, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “How far these policies can go in terms of actually generating new students into the system that weren’t already going before is a little bit unclear. I have a few … doubts about that.”
Some researchers questioned how the guarantee will change UW-Madison’s enrollment in the long run. Odle, the UW-Madison assistant professor, estimated the program will help support the admission of mostly affluent, white, female students — demographics overrepresented in the top 5% across Wisconsin, which the university is already good at recruiting and retaining.
Given Wisconsin’s population is less diverse than other states with top-percent admissions programs, some also questioned if the guarantee could decrease the racial and socioeconomic diversity among students at the flagship.
“In the end, wealthier schools and families will actually benefit more from a top-percentage plan than if everything is equal in terms of all the resources and opportunities across the state,” said Carson Byrd, an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan. “A lot of this sounds like it’s more meritorious, but really, what it’s doing is compounding the educational and socioeconomic inequalities of communities.”
Britz, the UW system official, said the guarantee provides the state’s public universities another recruitment tool, and he believes rural students could benefit.
“It is not a data thing,” Britz said. “It is, for me, a statement that we care for the best and the brightest.”
As Glaus moved into her dorm at UW-Madison a few weeks ago, her parents and her brother helped haul pillows, clothing cubes and a fake plant into the tight room.
Glaus’ mom, Miranda, proudly reported she hadn’t cried yet moving Glaus into the dorm — though she admitted to tearing up on the three-hour car ride to Madison and again during lunch at a campus dining hall.
With Glaus being a first-generation student, her admission and the move were bound to bring up a lot of emotions.
“Overwhelming. Proud. Excited. Sad,” Miranda Glaus said. “Dad is very nervous.”
“I’m glad she chose here,” Brad Glaus, her dad, added.
“It was either here or Michigan,” her mom said.
While Glaus debated enrolling at the University of Michigan, she chose UW-Madison for its kinesiology program and proximity to home, much to her parents’ delight. The Wisconsin Guarantee merely reinforced her choice to become a Badger.
“I’m not really sure that it influenced my decision too much,” she said. “It made me feel even better about going there, knowing that they want me.”
Whether or not the guarantee existed, Glaus’ parents never doubted their daughter would get into UW-Madison.
“I knew she deserved it,” Miranda Glaus said. “She was going to go wherever she wanted to go.”
Erin Gretzinger is a K-12 education reporter and Becky Jacobs is a higher education reporter for the Cap Times in Madison. They can be reached at egretzinger@captimes.com and bjacobs@captimes.com.
Wisconsin’s college admissions law has unintended consequences 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 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is considering offering a three-year education degree to save their students money, while getting teachers into classrooms faster.
The post UW-Milwaukee could offer teachers a 3-year degree to help MPS teacher shortage appeared first on WPR.
The Universities of Wisconsin may permanently eliminate college entrance exams scores as a required part of the first year student admission processes.
The post UW Education Committee proposes to permanently waive SAT and ACT test score requirements appeared first on WPR.
We’ve partnered with Open Campus, a nationwide nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education, to organize an event on how credentials impact Wisconsin’s workforce.
And we’d love for you to join us on Oct. 6.
I enjoy editing the “pathways to success” beat because it’s where K-12, higher ed and workforce training stories intersect. I spent years covering K-12 and higher ed, and the stories I most loved reporting focused on how students took the skills they learned in the classroom into their careers.
Credentials have expanded in recent years, and it feels like the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been for students, educators and employers.
So we want to know:
The event will feature a panel discussion moderated by Wisconsin Watch and Open Campus reporter Natalie Yahr. The panelists include:
Then, we’ll hear how Wisconsin fits into the national landscape during a conversation between Wisconsin Watch and Open Campus reporter Miranda Dunlap and Kermit Kaleba, strategy director for credentials of value for the Lumina Foundation.
The event is free to attend. Here are the details:
We hope to see you there!
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Wisconsin Watch, Open Campus event focuses on workforce development 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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