Dear Commons Community,

Declining enrollments. Changing demographics. Tightening budgets. And, above all, an “evolving student marketplace.”

All these elements led Jay O. Rothman, president of the University of Wisconsin system, to announce in Fall 2023 that the system was closing one two-year campus and ending in-person instruction at two others. More closures may be on the horizon, as Rothman ordered university leaders to examine the financial viability of the remaining 10 two-year campuses. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“It’s time for us to realign our branch campuses to current market realities and prepare for the future,” Rothman said in a statement. “The status quo is not sustainable.”

Nearly half of Wisconsin’s community colleges have been shuttered in the past year.

Most recently, the grim trend came for the Fox Cities campus of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, which will close in the spring of 2025, officials announced last week.

This wasn’t the plan. In 2017, the University of Wisconsin system announced a bold measure that officials said was meant to preserve the 13 two-year institutions — by merging each of them with one of the system’s universities.

Since the mergers went through, most of the two-year colleges have continued to lose students and tuition dollars. Now, as more campus closures loom in the near future, outraged professors and residents are pointing fingers at university leaders and state lawmakers for the harm they’re causing in local communities.

We will see more closures and mergers in other parts of the country as declining student enrollments plague higher education.

Tony

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