MADISON, Wis. — Republican lawmakers vowed Friday to freeze University of Wisconsin System tuition, seizing on a new report that shows the system has amassed a huge surplus of tuition dollars by raising prices on students for years.
System President Kevin Reilly fueled the GOP’s anger by releasing a statement ahead of the report, saying he planned to recommend the Board of Regents impose a 2 percent tuition increase in each of the next two years. The statement left Republicans aghast, with the chairman of the Assembly’s colleges and education committee calling for Reilly’s firing and a GOP senator from the Legislature’s powerful finance committee apologizing to students in a statement.
“Come on, pal,” Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, told The Associated Press in an interview separate from the statement. “To come back and say we need another 2 percent upper after this?”
The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo found the system finished the year that ended June 30, 2012, with nearly $650 million in reserve across a number of accounts, including $414.1 million in tuition. The report notes system officials identified specific purposes for about $332 million of the tuition surplus, including technology purchases, financial aid and investing in a new program to give students credit for work experience and other life knowledge. But the system did not provide a timetable for those payouts, the report said.
The report went on to say the system had a $393.3 million tuition surplus as of mid-2011 and a $212.8 million tuition surplus as of mid-2009.
The system built the surpluses as it steadily increased tuition rates, citing dwindling state aid and the need to recruit and retain top-tier faculty with competitive compensation packages.
The Board of Regents has raised base tuition across the system’s four-year schools by 5.5 percent annually since the 2007-08 academic year. The increase has been steeper at schools such as UW-Madison that levy additional charges on top of their base tuition. A year of tuition for a UW-Madison resident undergraduate cost $9,273 this year, up nearly 8 percent from last year and more than 16 percent from the previous year, according to the fiscal bureau.
