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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 10/3/06 |
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Reprinted from: Green Bay Press-Gazette April 9, 2006 Q&A: UW System focused on new economy By Bob Van Enkenvoort
Q: The Board of Regents voted in March to oppose the Taxpayer Protection Amendment. How would this amendment impact the UW System?
Shepard: It would be totally devastating. It is just unimaginable. It is worse than what has happened in Colorado. ... I was in the state system when Oregon had something like this put into place in a constitutional amendment decades ago. We spent 10 years fighting a losing battle trying to win what I described as a pell-mell race toward mediocrity. What happened was that a fine K-12 system, a fine higher ed system, was devastated. It continues to be. ... The sad thing is what I saw in Oregon. ... The first year you don't notice it too much, the next year a little bit more, the year after a bit more, a bit more, a bit more ... When I left Oregon, it had the highest unemployment rates in the country. You can trace that right back ... I coined the term "policide." The state tried to kill itself.
Q: What is the UW System doing to fill the "skills gap" that is beginning to impact some businesses and industry as baby boomers retire and there aren't enough skilled workers to replace them?
REILLY: We've increased the number of general education credits that students in the tech colleges can bring into the UW, no questions asked, from 25 to 30. More of the tech college's occupational and technical courses are now eligible for transfer for particular programs. Some of that work that we've done is evidenced, I think, by the fact that in the last 10 years the number of transfer students from the Wisconsin Technical College System to us has grown from 1,900 10 years ago to 3,300 this year. It's not just a matter of credits and numbers. We're trying to be innovative in creating some new career-degree patterns students can follow. ... Bruce is working with his counterpart at (Northeast Wisconsin Technical College) and their colleagues to create what we're going to call a bachelor of applied studies. The idea here is it's kind of an upside-down degree. Most of us took most of our general ed courses in the first two years and then junior, senior year, to earn your baccalaureate degree, did your major. The notion here is if we're going to expedite transfer for kids coming out of technical colleges, they already come in with something equivalent to a major that they've earned with their associates degree at the technical college. We'd like to figure out how to broaden them out by doing their general course work in the junior and senior years at a higher level.
Q: Student leaders recently asked the UW System to focus on making schools more accessible to struggling Wisconsin families. In that regard, Gov. Jim Doyle recently announced a program to give college aid to low-income students who meet academic and civic requirements. Who will pay?
Reilly: We're still in the business of fleshing that out. The idea is the state would step up with general purpose revenue to help close the gap of the tuition costs for students who need us to do that. Many of these students are already eligible for combinations of state and federal grants and scholarships. It's a matter of ensuring that students, especially from the poorest families but some we hope up into the lower middle class — who have a gap between what that aid will now cover and what tuition goes to — will have that gap covered through this program. It's not just about helping some folks go to college because we like to think of ourselves as good folks. For taxpayers, it's about the future economic vitality of this state. It's about whether everybody's kids and everybody's grandkids are going to be able to find jobs here that will be able to sustain a life and sustain a career or not. We've got to get more of our folks going to school, going to college. It's in everybody's best interest to do that ... all taxpayers.
Q: Some people have criticized a plan to decrease tuition for out-of-state students by $2,000. How will that help the UW System?
Reilly: We knew our out-of-state tuition had gotten so high that we priced ourselves out of the market. We were losing millions, $5 million a year I think it was, from what we had been collecting from out-of-state students. What we promised to do was in that action to not just decrease the tuition for out-of-state students, because we wanted more of them. We wanted the revenue stream we had lost so we could plow it into seats for in-state students. So we guaranteed that, systemwide, we would increase the number of in-state students as well as the number of out-of-state students by doing this.
Crain: People don't understand that even at the reduced out-of-state tuition that it more than pays for the education of that student. You would also think that increasing the number of out-of-state students would also mean some brain gain as well.
Q: How do you explain to the average citizen how UW System research, such as biotech and stem cell research, pays off for the entire state?
Reilly: Academic research and development is now an $800 million industry. The projection by the Wisconsin Technology Council is at that rate it employs over 30,000 people in Wisconsin. That's more than the construction industry employs annually in Wisconsin. It's an industry that's already here in a big way because of the reputation of the University of Wisconsin. ... It will generate the industries of the future that are nonpolluting, that are high-paying with family-living wages and that will spin off more and more positive activity of all kinds and products and services that will have a Wisconsin brand that will be good for the future of the state.
Q: Will all two-year UW campuses remain open in the foreseeable future?
Reilly: We don't have any plans to close any of those campuses now, but what I can tell you is that they're evolving. That is, when I came to Wisconsin 10 years ago, there was very little offering on any of those campuses of baccalaureate degrees. We now have across the UW two-year campuses some 70 baccalaureate degrees being offered by our four-year institutions to people who are place-bound in those communities where those two-year universities are and they can study to complete their baccalaureate degrees right on those campuses. Down at UW-Waukesha we're strongly looking now at the notion of a university center concept. Waukesha, which currently offers programs from UW-Milwaukee and UW-Whitewater, will expand the number of programs there and officially become a kind of a mixed, two-year, four-year and graduate institution. ... Those campuses will continue to evolve in the way they've already started to. At the same time, they continue to serve a really important purpose for a lot of place-bound students, many of them in small, rural communities who can't afford to economically or just aren't psychologically ready to leave mom and dad, or leave their small town to go to Milwaukee or even come to Green Bay. We don't want to lose those kids out of the pipeline. We want to get them started there and, hopefully, get them through and then have them transfer to Milwaukee or Green Bay or wherever they want to go.
Q: Should the UW Board of Regents be elected to make it more accountable to taxpayers?
Reilly: I feel strongly no. The history, I think, of states that have elected boards, and there are a number of them, is that the politics get more and more intrusive in the inner working of the university. It does not serve the state well in the long run. I think the whole notion of the kind of board of regents we have is to provide two things. The first is to serve as kind of a buffer and a conduit. Sometimes they will buffer the university from intrusion that it shouldn't be subject to. At other times, it'll serve as a conduit to let some of the heat in from the general public and elected officials when we need to change, representing the outside world to the university. But they can best do that when they are not self interested in their own elections or having to run under the auspices of a political party.
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