Dear Commons Community,

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee announced earlier this week 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.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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.

Unfortunately, campus closures will continue in Wisconsin and elsewhere as projected student enrollment declines continue.

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.