Chancellor: budget cuts require greater 'resourcefulness'
Released: August 18, 2003
After a year dominated by massive state budget cuts to higher education, the health of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater may well depend on greater financial resourcefulness, Chancellor Jack Miller said Monday.
The occasion was Miller’s annual “state of the university” address at UW-Whitewater’s Young Auditorium. About 500 faculty and staff attended the talk, which dealt with the budget pain but also highlighted campus progress over the past year.
UW-Whitewater will be facing a new biennium with $2.6 million less state revenue than the year before, Miller said. The cuts forced a 16.7 percent tuition increase and a reduced enrollment by 100 to 150 new students. Cuts also translated to more than 30 lost positions and a greater teaching workload for instructors.
“For students (in the UW System), the bottom line is they will be paying $150 million more in tuition for $100 million less in services,” Miller said. “It is our job to make that difference as invisible as possible to students.”
Miller said the most harmful short-term impact could be on programs for the support and development of faculty and staff. He said the university must continue to become more self-reliant in raising revenue from sources other than state funding.
Miller cited distance education, graduate enrollment and non-resident enrollment as areas that will be key to greater financial flexibility to the campus. Distance education courses, such as the online MBA, have increased by 270 percent over the past four years. Graduate program enrollment has increased by 39 percent over the same period, while the enrollment of non-resident students (primarily from Illinois) has risen 25 percent.
Growth in those areas enabled the university to find more support for curriculum grants, faculty research projects and diversity grants. “We have to continue to find resources for support and develop our own capacity to reach our goals,” Miller said.
In spite of the bleak budget news, Miller said the past year was marked by a number of quiet accomplishments. The graduation rate at UW-Whitewater increased by nearly 7 percentage points in the past four years, to 54.1 percent.
“That amounts to 140 more college graduates, over 80 percent of whom stay in Wisconsin to earn and pay taxes on $1 million more than their high school graduate counterparts over a lifetime,” Miller said. “That’s economic development.”
Other accomplishments include:
• The launching of a new Advisement and Exploration Center, which connects every UW-Whitewater student with advising support the moment they arrive on campus;
• New and renovated facilities, including major state commitments to the $27 million Upham Hall science building renovation and the $33 million business building;
• Greater student involvement and volunteerism, which included 56,000 hours of volunteer service to the region last year and $40,000 in donated funds.
“It really was a terrific year last year,” Miller said. “The budget crisis didn’t stop our faculty, staff and students from doing some wonderful things.”
- Brian Mattmiller,npa@uww.edu
