The System lost about $50 million - or 5 percent of its state money - in the current fiscal year to help balance a state deficit of about $1.5 billion. That shortfall is less than half the size of the one now facing lawmakers in the two-year budget starting July 1, leading to a likely System cut of perhaps $100 million or more if the pattern holds.

System President Katharine Lyall said individual chancellors at the 26 campuses would decide how to apply any cuts, as they have done with this year's shortfall. But a budget exercise that the System was required to do in November showed a 5 percent cut could cause nearly 1,000 layoffs plus enrollment cuts of 7,816 students, if tuition didn't increase.

With a tuition increase of 8.4 percent or more, the layoffs and enrollment reductions could be avoided, Lyall said. System officials tout higher tuition as preferable to enrollment cuts, especially because the System trails nearly all Big Ten schools in the Midwest in resident tuition.

"We may have reached the point where our state's financial situation doesn't support the deep subsidies we've been giving to higher education students," Lyall said last week. "It often makes sense for a state to focus its tax subsidies on the neediest students and adjust the sticker price up closer to the average of its peers so families that can afford to pay more do."

If tuition increases alone don't do it, possible steps include unspecified program cuts, hiring freezes, freshman enrollment caps and reduced campus services such as maintenance or operating hours at libraries, student unions and cafeterias.

UW-Stevens Point Chancellor Tom George said cutting services was better than laying off teachers or turning away new students.

"The social milieu on campus will start to suffer," George said. "But people would rather go to a starker environment as long as we have the quality of instruction and access."

At UW-Whitewater, Chancellor Jack Miller said he would prefer capped enrollment.

"The problem with the System is we're way over-enrolled already," Miller said. "We feel that serving the students who are here now and trying to keep our commitment to graduating them in a timely fashion probably comes before expanding access."

But in the System's network of 13 two-year schools, lower admission standards are designed to provide maximum access. Chancellor Bill Messner said he would support capping freshmen enrollment on those campuses only as a last resort.

"We're at an all-time high in enrollment because we're looking at unprecedented demand," Messner said last week, noting that applications to the two-year System, totaling 3,692, were running 188 percent higher than last year.

Enrollment pressure also is up at the System's four-year colleges, making now the wrong time to close any campuses, officials said. Such a move might not save much money, Lyall said, because many of those students could transfer to other System schools, increasing the need for resources at those locations unless a System-wide decision was made to cut enrollment.

Shifting money within the System budget also has its limits. While tuition increases can make up for cuts in state money for instruction, other pots of money that the System gets - such as the $714 million received this year in federal research grants and financial aid - are not interchangeable.

The System this year got about 31 percent of its $3.49 billion budget from the state, for about 8.5 percent of all state spending.

"Wisconsin spends a high percentage of its state revenues on higher education," Lyall said. "But we educate 50 percent more students than other states."

The national access rate to higher education is 22 percent, Lyall said, compared to the 33 percent of resident high school seniors who attend System schools. Current state spending per capita in Wisconsin, at $222.71, is slightly higher than the U.S. median of $221.94, according to the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University.