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Blame Legislature for tuition hike
Correction: The extra $100,000 to cover new UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn "Biddy" Martin's salary is being picked up by the UW Foundation and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Previously, this editorial read that it was being picked up by the UW Foundation and the Wisconsin Alumni Association. The Capital Times regrets the error.
Money was flying everywhere at this week's University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting.
The board gave new Madison Chancellor Carolyn "Biddy" Martin a $437,000 salary -- about $100,000 more than outgoing chancellor John Wiley made this past year -- and hiked UW System President Kevin Reilly's annual paycheck by $73,000 to $414,593.
At the same meeting, the board approved raising tuition for most students in the system by 5.5 percent. It will now cost most in-state undergraduates $6,678 in tuition alone for the next school year.
While it would be easy to criticize the regents for raising salaries in the face of the nation's and state's economic downturn and balancing higher costs on the backs of the students, if fingers need to be pointed, they need to point directly at the State Capitol.
It's significant, for instance, that the extra $100,000 to cover Martin's salary (she is making $500,000 as provost at Cornell) will be picked up by the UW Foundation and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Plus, Reilly will donate $70,000 of his $73,000 raise to the fund that helps financially needy students. Obviously, neither of these raises would have caused the 5.5 percent tuition hike by themselves, but those actions, if nothing else, send a positive signal.
The tuition hike, however, is a different matter. More than half of the increase is the result of the Wisconsin Legislature and the governor creating a free UW tuition program for Wisconsin veterans and then not providing enough money to pay for it -- one more example of the state's nickel-and-diming of its university system.
Roughly $18 million of the money generated by the tuition hike will go to cover the extra costs of the vets' program. In other words, the kids on campus will wind up paying for the program out of their own hides rather than the state spreading the cost to everyone.
We can hear the Rep. Steve Nasses of the Legislature readying new broadsides at UW for hiking tuition when, indeed, their own shortsightedness is largely responsible.
It is just one more fact that voters need to remember when they go to the polls this fall.
