Following a furor among lawmakers after it was learned that the University of Wisconsin system had nearly $650-million in reserves, Gov. Scott Walker on Wednesday recommended freezing tuition and scaling back his proposed budget increase for the system by $94-million over the next two years, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Freezing tuition would cost the university an additional $42-million in revenue from 2-percent increases it was seeking in each of those years.
The Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee is now considering the governor’s budget and making its own changes. In a memorandum to the committee on Wednesday, the governor’s administration secretary, Mike Huebsch, said the administration was “saddened that the UW System did not show leadership during a fiscal crisis and instead made the burden of a public higher education heavier while stockpiling cash.”
The system’s colleges and universities will reallocate $42-million from other resources to cover the loss of the proposed tuition increase, the system’s president, Kevin P. Reilly, said in a written statement. “We share the governor’s interest in keeping college affordable and tuition low.” He added that a two-year freeze would “send the right message to Wisconsin students and families.”
The university system had more than $1-billion in reserve as of June 2012, of which $648-million was unrestricted, the Journal Sentinel reported. The total reserve is on track to climb to nearly $1.2-billion by the end of June, university officials have projected.
Gerald Whitburn, a member of the university’s Board of Regents and chairman of the board’s budget committee, said the governor’s action was a message to the system “to step up transparency big time, and I expect that’s exactly what you’re going to see in the future.”
