The closing of another two-year branch campus in Wisconsin is being cast as either a harbinger of a darkening future for the sector or a promising test case for reimagining public higher education in the state.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee announced on Monday that it will close its branch campus in Waukesha in the spring of 2025, making it the fifth two-year campus in the UW system to be marked for closure as the state grapples with the sustainability of its higher-education infrastructure.
The latest closure plays out against the backdrop of a larger debate about the size and makeup of, and the competition among, the state’s public institutions of higher education. For decades, Wisconsin’s two-year branch campuses existed as a separate network. Amid declining enrollment and a sharp drop in state funding, the university system consolidated its 13 two-year colleges under several four-year institutions in 2018. Advocates for the two-year institutions argue the move pulled away funding, resources, and students, hurting the mostly rural campuses. They also point to a long history of state disinvestment that has made Wisconsin’s four-year public campuses among the lowest funded in the nation as having manufactured a crisis for the smaller campuses.
Enrollment at the Waukesha campus dropped by 65 percent over the past decade, which was similar to the 60-percent decline seen across the system’s other two-year branch campuses since enrollment peaked in 2010. As is also the case at many of the branch campuses, competition with nearby technical colleges played a role. UW-Milwaukee pointed to recently expanded associate-degree offerings at Waukesha County Technical College — located just miles away from its branch campus — as a driving factor behind the closure decision.
“You essentially have this duplication at a higher cost,” Mark Mone, UW-Milwaukee’s chancellor, told The Chronicle, adding that the cost per student is the same at the main R1 four-year campus as at its two-year campuses, but that the latter brings in half as much revenue. “There simply isn’t a positive path going forward.”
Mone’s reasoning echoed that provided for four other closures of UW system branch campuses in the past few months. In January, UW-Green Bay ended in-person classes at its campus in Marinette, Wis. A few months before that, in October 2023, Jay O. Rothman, the system’s president, closed a branch in Richland Center, Wis., and scheduled two others for closure, the campuses in Fond du Lac and Washington County.
The Washington County campus is another branch of UW-Milwaukee. Following the announcement of its closure last fall, faculty members there told The Chronicle that they had hoped to be able to move to positions on the Waukesha campus, which, they said, administrators had assured them would not be affected. Now, the Waukesha campus is also closing its doors. Mone said “all or a large number of” about 120 employees at the Waukesha and Washington County campuses will receive layoff notices, including some 40 tenured and tenure-track faculty members.
A ‘Remarkable’ Opportunity
Under the circumstances, Mone believes he’s found the best path forward: UW-Milwaukee will partner with the nearby technical college to open a university center to preserve student access to associate degrees and transfer pathways, while also paving the way for the technical college to hire university employees who will lose their jobs.
To many observers, the closures of Wisconsin’s two-year campuses have been decades in the making, with changing demographics and an overlap between the state’s separate technical and university systems that amounts to an overbuilt infrastructure that is no longer tenable. After months of looking for options for the Waukesha campus following the Washington County closure, Mone found himself seeing substantive change as inevitable.
“We knew with Washington County that closure was imminent. It was pretty clear,” he told The Chronicle. “We were trying to find that sustainable path in Waukesha, but we just haven’t been able to find it from a variety of different sources, whether it’s K-12, superintendents, employers, families, students, but importantly, you can’t argue with the demographics.”
As the gravity of the situation became increasingly clear, Mone said the final step in the “confluence of these events” emerged in recent weeks. Mone said there was a “remarkable” opportunity to partner with Waukesha County Technical College that came on the heels of a January agreement between UW-Milwaukee and several other technical colleges to guarantee the technical-college graduates admission to the university and make a clearer pathway to transfer credits.
“This new partnership illustrates a forward, collaborative solution,” Rothman, the system’s president, said in a statement. “I asked chancellors to review the operations of their branch campuses and develop strategies in the best interest of their communities, and this partnership maintains educational access for students while demonstrating our fiscal stewardship.”
Richard Barnhouse, the president of Waukesha County Technical College, said the college can easily absorb more students and employ more faculty members in new and growing disciplines, with other faculty additions contingent on increases in enrollment. To Barnhouse, who previously worked for the two-year colleges, the partnership could be a test case for Wisconsin and other parts of the country facing demographic declines. If this setup became the status quo across the state, he imagines it could lead to a win-win for universities and technical colleges, one in which collaboration replaces fighting over students. For students, it provides a lot of degree and transfer opportunities. For communities, it maintains an economic engine.
“Ensuring that there’s long term viability and success and growth, this is really the model for that,” Barnhouse told The Chronicle. “Because otherwise, you’ve got colleges and universities who start cutting, cutting, cutting. They’re cutting faculty, they’re cutting staff, and that’s really kind of a death spiral. It might take 10 or 15 years, but it’s not a long period of time now. And so the path forward is to get in front of this.”
The Human Toll
Not all are convinced that the path forward carved out in the technical college and university partnership is the best for the long-term viability of higher education in the state. That’s how it feels to Tricia Wessel, an associate professor at the Washington County campus, who was skeptical last fall that the Waukesha campus could stave off closure and that tenured faculty would be able to keep their jobs, despite repeated assurances from university officials. .
Wessel also sees Waukesha’s closure as yet another clumsy step in the university system’s efforts to manage its branch campuses, whose decisions, advocates have argued, made the two-year campuses worse off in the long run. They also fret that the move sets a worrisome precedent for the direction of the system, one that could lead to the closure of all two-year campuses, many of which are seen as providing crucial educational access to rural communities.
“There’s just no consideration for the human side of things in terms of staff, faculty, and students,” Wessel told The Chronicle. “It’s just kind of like, ‘Nope, we’re just going to try this and see if this helps right the ship.’”
Complaints of minimal community involvement, a lack of communication, and the absence of a broader plan for the system have remained a through-line in the reactions to the system’s decisions about the struggling two-year campuses. While several former system officials have called for a comprehensive plan and some state legislators have indicated support for such conversations, no action has been taken.
“These ongoing developments further emphasize Wisconsin’s need to re-envision our higher-ed systems,” wrote state Sen. Rob Hutton, a Republican, who leads the state’s committee on universities and revenue, in a statement about the Waukesha closure. “Without that vision of how we educate and prepare tomorrow’s leaders and work force, we will need to continue taking these necessary Band-Aid measures in order to temporarily sustain our campuses.”
Meanwhile, faculty members at the affected two-year campuses and others across the system worry about what comes next. Many of them feared such layoffs would result from changes to tenure made under Scott Walker, the state’s former Republican governor, said David Simmons, treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers in Wisconsin and the chair of UW-Whitewater’s philosophy and religious- studies department.
Program discontinuance was added as a reason to eliminate tenure under Walker’s policy changes, and this is the first major example of those changes being made. In addition to changes in tenure, Walker whittled college budgets, diminished university autonomy, and suggested gutting the Wisconsin Idea, a concept enshrined in state law that emphasizes higher education’s importance to the state and society. Simmons sees the two-year campus closures as the result of policies Walker set in motion. Now, Wessel and Simmons said there’s concern that tenure will be devalued not just at other two-year campuses that are at risk but also at four-year campuses under financial strain. Last fall the system announced that 10 of 13 four-year universities projected structural deficits, some of which have begun considering cuts and issuing layoffs.
“A lot of what’s happening right now is chickens coming home to roost for changes that were made starting in 2015 that affected these protections of the people who do the work of providing Wisconsin residents or Wisconsin citizens with an affordable education,” Simmons said.
Many faculty members worry about the fallout that’s yet to come. A directive from the university system calls on colleges to eliminate budget deficits and examine the financial viability of branch campuses. Campuses will have to confront that mandate and the conditions that led to it.
