The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is trying to make textbooks more accessible through the Open Textbooks and Open Educational Resources project which eliminates the cost of some textbooks and course materials for students.
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Tuition at Wisconsin’s public university system will be frozen for the 2027-29 biennium if the Legislature agrees to invest $190 million in the Universites of Wisconsin System.
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The university system is seeking $240 million for programs that it says would train 300,000 workers and create 2,500 new businesses. Another $90 million would go to expand programs for healthcare professionals.
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Students walk across the University of Louisville campus. Kentucky is one of 17 states the Trump administration sued to block in-state tuition for students in the country without permanent legal immigration status. (Photo by McKenna Horsley/Kentucky Lantern)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice has sued New York, Connecticut and Vermont over laws that allow immigrants in the country without permanent legal status to pay in-state college tuition in the states where they live.
The suits, filed Aug. 10, are part of a larger push from the Trump administration to go after states with such policies, as the administration seeks to curb any benefits that could be extended to people without permanent legal status.
Since President Donald Trump re-took office, the DOJ has sued 17 states over laws that allow noncitizen students who meet certain requirements access to in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, regardless of their immigration status.
In five of those lawsuits the DOJ filed — targeting Texas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Illinois — courts have already struck down the laws. All of those states, except for Illinois, had joined with the federal government rather than defend their laws.
Beyond New York, Connecticut and Vermont, lawsuits are also pending in California, Colorado, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia.
The lawsuits argue that the policies allow students without permanent legal status to pay drastically lower tuition for public education than U.S. citizens from other states.
“This is a simple matter of federal law: colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the DOJ’s Civil Division said in a statement regarding the New York, Connecticut and Vermont lawsuits.
“This Department of Justice will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country,” Shumate said.
At least 20 states and Washington, D.C., offer in-state tuition to “the states’ undocumented students,” according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, a project of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization.
Roughly 525,000 “undocumented students” are enrolled in colleges and universities across the U.S., according to the Portal. An estimated 129,900 “undocumented students” are eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
DACA is intended to help people brought into the country without legal documentation as children. The program, created by the Obama administration in 2012, protects participants from deportation and allows them to receive work permits and obtain driver’s licenses.
Five states, Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Ohio and Texas, limit in-state tuition access to DACA recipients, according to the Portal.
Ongoing court battles threaten DACA recipients in Texas with the possibility of losing their ability to obtain a work permit.
Diego Sánchez, vice president of policy and strategy at the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said the DOJ’s efforts to pursue states that offer in-state tuition benefits to students without permanent legal status is “unprecedented.”
“It’s a coordinated federal effort to dismantle state tuition equity policies that have existed for decades,” Sánchez told States Newsroom.
Sánchez added that the policies “do not provide free college or special tuition discounts — they generally allow students who attended and graduated from high school in the state and meet additional state requirements to pay the same in-state tuition rate as the classmates they grew up with.”
The students “still have to apply, they still have to be admitted, pay tuition and meet the same academic requirements as everyone else,” he said. “The state has already invested in these students … these are benefits that don’t only apply (to) undocumented students.”
The DOJ’s lawsuits came after Trump signed an executive order in April 2025 that calls on the U.S. attorney general to stop the enforcement of state laws and policies “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens that are unlawful, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable, including State laws that provide in-State higher education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-State American citizens.”
Texas was the first state the DOJ pursued over such policies.
The Justice Department challenged in June 2025 the Lone Star State’s 2001 law — the first of its kind in the country — signed by former Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
Rather than defend the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump-aligned Republican, sided with the DOJ to try to permanently block the state law and signed an agreement the same day the DOJ filed suit. A federal judge then blocked the Texas law.
A federal appeals court in July rejected an attempt from two advocacy groups, a Texas community college and a student to intervene in the case and defend the Texas law. The appeals effort came after the federal judge had earlier rejected the groups’ attempt to intervene.
“It’s not the end of the road yet, but it’s been an uphill battle,” said Efrén Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, one of several public interest groups that sought to intervene on behalf of one of the advocacy groups, the Texas community college and the student.
“It’s a shame because for the last year, thousands of kids who, all they’re doing is trying to get a college education to better themselves and their families, are now prevented from doing so by exorbitant tuition.”
Losing college graduates affects the state’s workforce and economy in both urban and rural communities. One business leader said his organization thinks about brain drain “on a weekly basis.”
The post Wisconsin has second-largest ‘brain drain’ in the country despite high education attainment appeared first on WPR.
Numbers crunched by the Associated Press show student loan defaults have increased sharply since last fall, including by 50 percent in Wisconsin. Advocates say they are worried this situation will worsen as borrowers are forced to leave the Saving on a Valuable Education plan.
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Leaders of Wisconsin nursing schools are optimistic a new emergency rule allowing RNs with bachelor's degrees to teach hands-on courses will help ease a faculty shortage.
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For the first time in its history, the Medical College of Wisconsin will have on-campus student housing.
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Some teachers and experts are questioning whether students actually know more than their counterparts who graduated before them, or whether the scores are a result of the College Board changing its grading criteria for AP exams.
The post Wisconsin high schoolers scoring higher on AP tests, but some question why appeared first on WPR.
U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Virginia, speaks during a 2020 news conference in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Education experts and advocates warned Wednesday that the recent federal student loan system overhaul stemming from the GOP’s mega tax and spending cut law will drive borrowers to private lenders and could derail their higher education plans.
U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, convened a panel to blast the sweeping loan changes, as well as separate, ongoing efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the Education Department and its impact on the federal student aid system.
“Student loan debt now exceeds $1.7 trillion. Borrowers need clear guidance and certainty,” Scott said. “Instead, they’re forced to deal with uncertainty and chaos created by an administration that has systematically weakened the federal student aid system.”
Scott criticized Education’s plans to transfer core student aid functions to the Treasury Department. Under an interagency agreement, or IAA, announced in March, Treasury will take over Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt in what marks the first step in a multi-phase process toward Treasury taking on the entire federal student loan portfolio.
The Virginia Democrat said Treasury “has no expertise serving students or institutions of higher education or monitoring servicers for accuracy.”
Meanwhile, the Education Department finalized regulations — most of which took effect July 1 — that implement sweeping student loan system changes outlined in the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law.
Scott said that the sweeping changes to the federal student loan system originating from that law are “compounding the issues that have risen from the dismantling of the Education Department.”
Among the major changes are new loan limits for graduate and professional students, a restructured repayment system that gives new borrowers only two plans to choose from and the elimination of a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing.
Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said the mega tax and spending cut law “restricts access to federal graduate lending, pushing many borrowers, especially those from low-income and middle-income backgrounds, many of whom are students of color, into the hands of private banks.”
Del Pilar, who was deputy secretary of postsecondary and higher education for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said that would present a series of challenges for borrowers.
“That means higher interest rates, fewer consumer protections, stricter credit requirements, and flat-out denials for some, forcing those students to halt their educational journey,” he said.
Clare McCann, managing director of policy and operations at the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center, said her organization was “very concerned that for many borrowers who want to continue to pursue a graduate education, that they will find themselves locked out of the private market or unable to access affordable loans without a qualified cosigner.”
McCann, whose organization is housed at American University, added that the center’s research suggested almost 40% of student borrowers subject to the new caps have either poor or no credit scores, making them unlikely to be able to borrow money in the private market without a cosigner.
McCann noted that allowing largely unlimited graduate lending is “unwise” and “puts both students and taxpayers at risk,” while calling on Congress to “allow students to borrow enough to make high-return investments in themselves, so long as their loans remain affordable and repayable based on the salaries students should expect.”
Ellen Keast, a spokesperson for the department, defended the student loan system overhaul, in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Wednesday.
“Blank checks to universities resulted in tuition skyrocketing for American students and families. Mass student loan forgiveness failed in nearly every courtroom it entered. The student loan portfolio is at a fiscal cliff because the last Administration perpetrated the lie that students do not need to repay their loans,” Keast said. “The Trump Administration is righting these wrongs – all while implementing historic reforms to federal student aid that will drive down the cost of college and simplify student loan repayment.”
Wisconsin student loan borrowers are struggling to repay after pandemic relief
ended, with those who attended for-profit colleges twice as likely to be delinquent.
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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.
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.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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.
A judge is set to sign off on Northland College's plan for doling out what's left of its restricted endowment. The college in northern Wisconsin borrowed $22 million from its endowment to fund operations before it closed last year, and some donors accuse them of violating the law.
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This month, thousands of Wisconsin’s estimated 700,000 federal student loan borrowers are seeing significant changes to their repayment plans as part of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which will likely have an effect on economic drivers like travel, dining, autos and home buying.
The post Changes to student loan plans likely to have ripple effect on broader Wisconsin economy appeared first on WPR.
A new kind of federal financial aid is set to become available this week, but it’s not yet clear when Wisconsin students can start using it.
Authorized by Congress in 2025’s controversial budget bill, the new Workforce Pell grant program was widely hailed as a bipartisan victory, opening the door for students to use the largest federal undergraduate grant program for short-term career training.
The roughly $1.5 billion investment could cover the costs for low-income individuals to get training in fields like truck driving and plumbing, which proponents say will help people break into new careers or move up at work.
Are you hoping to use a Workforce Pell grant?
We’d love to hear from you. Write to nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org to tell us about your plans.
But the funds also come with restrictions intended to ensure that students don’t spend their time — or the government’s money — earning credentials that don’t pay off.
The federal government has left it up to states to decide which programs make the cut. In Wisconsin, officials say that process could take years, with aid initially available only to students in a handful of carefully scrutinized programs.
“Wisconsin is approaching the initial rollout thoughtfully, treating it as a pilot phase focused on a limited number of high-quality, high-demand workforce programs,” said Katy Pettersen, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Technical College System.
Wisconsin Watch asked state officials how the rollout will work. Here’s what we learned.
Workforce Pell is a new program that allows low-income Americans to use Pell grants — the federal government’s largest financial aid program for undergraduates — to pay for workforce training courses as short as eight weeks.
The grants will be available to people who don’t have a graduate degree. Those who already have bachelor’s degrees are eligible to apply, even though they aren’t eligible for traditional Pell grants. The Department of Education estimates the new grants will support about 190,000 students each year.
The grants will be less than the maximum award for the traditional Pell grant program, according to the national education and workforce nonprofit Jobs for the Future. The exact amounts will be based on the amount of instructional time required.
That hasn’t been decided yet. Wisconsin colleges will need to submit programs to state officials for consideration. The Department of Workforce Development hopes to open that application in July.
Before then, Wisconsin officials must set the criteria that will determine which programs will be eligible. That includes deciding what it means for a career to be “in-demand” or “high-wage.” One federal guideline: To be eligible, programs must show 70% of their students complete training in a timely manner.
Programs must also be the right length. Workforce Pell dollars can only be used for training that runs for eight and 14 weeks and 150 to 599 clock hours. Some programs that would otherwise be eligible will likely be excluded for this reason.
Several programs, including ones that train truck drivers, dental auxiliary workers and emergency medical technicians, are “strong early candidates, given their alignment with workforce demand and expected performance outcomes,” Pettersen said.
Gov. Tony Evers and the Governor’s Council on Workforce Investment will determine which programs meet the criteria. They’ll submit their selections to the U.S. Department of Education.
Another factor limiting which programs can qualify is a federal requirement that programs must have met the eligibility criteria for at least 12 months. That means that if a college creates or modifies a program to comply with the rules, it won’t qualify for the first year.
“More options will come available over the next 12 to 24 months,” said DWD spokesperson Haley McCoy. “Wisconsin is moving deliberately to collaborate with stakeholders to optimize the opportunities the program offers.”
State officials have offered no official start date for when people will be able to utilize this financial aid.
When the law passed last year, it said funds would be available “for the award year beginning on July 1, 2026, and each subsequent award year.” Jobs for the Future called that timeline “aggressive,” saying the Department of Education might need more time to implement the program.
Indeed, the department didn’t release the rules governing Workforce Pell until nearly a year later. That, McCoy said, has delayed the process.
“The final rule, which established eligibility and process requirements, was not published by the Department of Education until May 18, 2026, with Workforce Pell set to go into effect less than two months later,” McCoy said, adding that the department “continues to work diligently towards the July 2026 launch date.”
Behind the scenes, college administrators are deciding which of their programs could qualify, said Scott Anderson, associate vice president of academic affairs and workforce development at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College.
Then, they’ll also have to spread the word to students.
“At this point, our financial aid office hasn’t received many questions from students specifically about Workforce Pell,” Anderson said. “We expect awareness and interest will increase as more information becomes available and the program officially launches.”
In the meantime, Wisconsinites interested in these grants can complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which is required for all types of Pell grants. The application is available at www.fafsa.gov.
Other states are in a similar boat, sprinting to decide which training programs fit the bill.
As of June 26, just 12 states have published an approval process, according to a tracker from the independent research platform Opportunity Data.
In California, state officials say the aid won’t be available for students for weeks or even several months. Lawmakers there are also weighing legislation that would place heavier restrictions on the kinds of programs that qualify, CalMatters reported.
Some Texas college officials have warned that the vetting process may mean students won’t access the funds until 2027.
People who enroll in short-term certification programs in Wisconsin have options for financial assistance, even if their program isn’t yet eligible for Workforce Pell.
The state offers other forms of tuition assistance, grants and scholarships. For example, students who enrolled in EMT training can now get reimbursed for some of their tuition costs.
To learn about other options, visit the Higher Educational Aids Board website.
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.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Federal financial aid for career training is here. When will Wisconsinites benefit? 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.
Wisconsin native Shawn Eichorst has been appointed to serve as the university’s new athletic director, interim Chancellor Eric Wilcots announced Wednesday.
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A broken chilled water line has significantly reduced the University of Wisconsin-Madison's ability to cool certain buildings.
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Washington County is allowed to sell the former University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Washington County campus to a Christian school following a judge’s ruling Friday.
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The army of small, white food delivery robots crisscrossing the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus for the past seven years have vanished. They're destined for city streets around the world as the company behind them transitions from mobile campus snack packs to grocery delivery drones.
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a state college grant program for minority students is unconstitutional. UW-Madison’s Taylor Odle said he hopes that program can be repurposed to address Wisconsin’s college affordability problem.
The post Wisconsin can still boost college affordability after Supreme Court ruling, researcher says appeared first on WPR.
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