Nearly half of Wisconsin’s community colleges have been shuttered in the past year.
Most recently, the grim trend came for the Fox Cities campus of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, which will close in the spring of 2025, officials announced last week.
This wasn’t the plan. In 2017, the University of Wisconsin system announced a bold measure that officials said was meant to preserve the 13 two-year institutions — by merging each of them with one of the system’s universities.
Since the mergers went through, most of the two-year colleges have continued to lose students and tuition dollars. Now, as more campus closures loom in the near future, outraged professors and residents are pointing fingers at university leaders and state lawmakers for the harm they’re causing in local communities.
“Higher education is under fire,” said Thomas M. Nelson, county executive in Outagamie County, which is part of the Fox Valley region, “and this is not a good way to shore up public confidence.”
The closing of the Fox Cities campus shouldn’t be a surprise, said Andrew J. Leavitt, chancellor of UW-Oshkosh. Its enrollment fell from about 1,700 students in 2014 to 562 this past academic year; the finances were unsustainable. But Leavitt acknowledged that the decision will cause a lot of hurt, nonetheless.
The 13 community colleges, formerly known as the UW Colleges, have traditionally served as an important entry point to higher education, especially in remote, rural parts of the state. The institutions offer a range of liberal-arts programs and operate separately from Wisconsin’s technical colleges.
System leaders were left with a variety of imperfect options and were constrained by the politics and the reality of limited dollars.
The failure of administrators and politicians to properly support the institutions has resulted in chaos and demoralization, said Jon Shelton, chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay and vice president for higher education at the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin, the union that represents many faculty members in the state.
“This is the fruit of having no management plan,” Shelton said, “and the intentional defunding of the university system by the legislature.”
Wisconsin’s efforts to consolidate its two- and four-year public colleges was a novel endeavor to solve the enrollment and financial problems facing higher education in numerous states. The campus closures there are a sign that mergers alone are not enough to avoid a larger reckoning in which many regional public and small private colleges are announcing sweeping academic cuts and layoffs — or making the call that their institution doesn’t have a future at all.
A Win-Win?
For the University of Wisconsin system, the merger plan was supposed to be a win-win: a logical path forward for the state’s struggling two-year colleges, and a way to curry favor with Republican lawmakers.
Between 2010 and 2017, total enrollment at the 13 UW Colleges had declined by nearly a third, to about 7,000 students — fewer than were enrolled at most of the state’s universities, according to a 2021 study of the mergers by Roger C. Schonfeld, a researcher at the consulting firm Ithaka S+R.
But closing colleges might have been politically unpopular with state lawmakers, especially those in rural districts where the campuses were located. Republican legislators had already come to see the UW system as wasteful and had made a series of cuts to higher-ed appropriations.
The “underlying logic” of consolidating the two-year and four-year campuses “was essentially political,” Schonfeld wrote, “recognizing the importance of maintaining and gaining allies in the state regions where the two-year campuses were located, which were largely rural and Republican.”
The practical goal of the plan was to increase the UW system’s enrollment and defy local demographic shifts — by enticing working adults with new programs at the colleges and a clear path to completing their degree at the linked university.
“One of the big themes in interviews we conducted,” Schonfeld said during an interview, “was whether you could cut your way out of a problem or grow your way out. Leaders understood they couldn’t cut their way out.”
This is a failure of imagination. We didn’t do anything to keep students and now we’re throwing out faculty.
Schonfeld said it’s not clear now if the system was too optimistic about their plans or could actually have solved the two-year colleges’ longstanding problems through consolidation. System leaders were left with a variety of imperfect options, Schonfeld said, and were constrained by the politics and the reality of limited dollars.
“With several years having passed,” Schonfeld wrote in his analysis, “the consolidation of 2017-18 has not resulted in dramatic changes to the colleges, either from an enrollment or a programming perspective.”
Another dimension to Wisconsin’s woes is that the four-year universities aren’t doing well financially, either. UW-Oshkosh just became the first institution in the system’s history to run out of reserves. Six UW campuses are facing structural deficits, which the system blames on the decade-long tuition freeze and lagging state appropriations.
Leavitt, the Oshkosh chancellor, said the university’s budget shortfalls are not the reason the Fox Cities campus is closing. The two-year college was simply not attracting enough students.
“It’s not so much the finances as it is the student demand,” said Leavitt, who noted there are 11 different colleges within a 50-mile radius of that campus.
That includes Fox Valley Technical College, which also offers an associate-of-arts degree. In Wisconsin, several two-year colleges face direct competition from a technical college.
“Failure of Imagination”
Critics of the consolidation plan don’t deny the challenges higher education is facing. But they believe some of the problems were the result of a process that was hastily put together, with little open discussion about whether it was a good idea or how it would actually work.
In his study, Schonfeld explained that Raymond W. Cross, system president at the time, “feared that any protracted discussion of the consolidation plan would lead to its failure. He recalls that he felt up against a wall to receive approval for the consolidation before further state appropriations cuts were made against the system.”
Decisions about how the mergers would work were largely left to the chancellors at individual universities, many of whom felt they weren’t set up for success, Schonfeld wrote.
Similarly, in announcing the closures, some faculty and community leaders feel that policymakers have done too much in secret and cut out their input, said Shelton, the faculty union’s vice president for higher education.
At UW-Milwaukee, for example, the forthcoming closure of the Waukesha campus will lead to the dismissal of more than 40 tenured faculty members. “We should have had a yearlong conversation to try and solve this issue,” said Shelton.
“This is a failure of imagination,” he added. “We didn’t do anything to keep students, and now we’re throwing out faculty.”
Pascale M. Manning, chair of the Faculty Senate at UW-Oshkosh, said it’s hard to disentangle whether the closures were caused by demographic and financial challenges or by the system’s poor planning.
But as Manning sees it, the real blame lies with elected leaders for a lack of commitment to higher education in the state.
“Crucially, the message to Wisconsin parents is that their children matter less than the children of parents in other states,” Manning wrote in an email. “There is no reason why the UW system — which has often been held up as an exemplary model of public higher education as a civic good — should lag so far behind its national peers in terms of investment.”
