The University of Wisconsin-Platteville is facing budget cuts in the midst of a $5 million structural deficit and tuition freeze.

Tuition rose for a decade within the University of Wisconsin System, leading up to the 2013-2014 tuition freeze.

UW-Platteville Chancellor Dennis J. Shields said at the budget forum on March 9 that one of the challenges UW-Platteville faces is university funding has suffered cuts for the last five biennia. Cuts were offset by significant increases in tuition.

“Prior to the tuition freeze coming in 2015-2017, we thought we had a handle on it,” Katie Curry, UW-Platteville Associate Budget Planner said. “So we thought that we were going to be able to make moderate cuts to get us through that point.”

Curry said that UW-Platteville is not going to have the money it has already been promised to spend on certain initiatives and items because the university has forecast more revenue than it can actually produce, causing tuition to rise 3 percent.

Vice Chancellor for Administrative Services, Robert Cramer, said each one percent increase in tuition generates about $450,000 in additional revenue.

“When the 2013-2015 tuition freeze was put into place, we had in our financial projections assumed tuition going up 2 percent per year, which at the time, we had a series of 5 percent increases, so we thought 2 percent was pretty modest,” Cramer said. “We recognized 5 should not continue because it’s not an affordable path for students.”

According to the Tuition Setting on the Budget & Planning section of the UW-System website, “Changes in tuition are the result of changes in costs, changes in state support for the university, and other factors. Significant reductions to the state support were made under the 2003-05, 2005-07, 2009-11, and 2011-13 biennial budgets.” It further states that during the 2003-05, 2009-11, and 2011-13 biennia, the Board of Regents increased tuition to offset GPR base reductions.

Shields said that if the legislature would allow, UW-Platteville would have to raise tuition by 15 percent to cover the budget cuts. Because increasing tuition is not an option at this point, Shields has outlined other areas of the university that could increase revenue. Shields says that he plans to build revenue through Tri-State Initiative and that he may be able to call on revenue from the Real Estate Foundation, if the university can firm up a few moving parts there. In addition, he said the university may be able to count on more support from the UW-Platteville Foundation in the future.

UW-Platteville will collect around $46.2 million in tuition revenue this fiscal year. The tuition pool consists of TSI tuition, Distance Learning and General Purpose Revenue. The 14-15 tuition breakdown according to the Redbook budget outlines are as follows:

Administrative Services: $7,414,790

Admissions and Financial Aid: $1,276,424

Advancement: $940,414

BILSA: $5,898,066

Chancellor: $1,441,805

Diversity: $1,039,958

EMS: $9,755,024

LAE: $9,128,589

Provost: $9,652,178

University Wide: $389,238

The base tuition cost to attend UW-Platteville is $7,491 per year for residents. It costs Minnesota residents $7,866, TSI students $10,491 and non-resident or international students $15,064. These numbers do not include housing or meal plans.

The cost of tuition has been steadily rising for decades. Looking back to the 2001-2002 fiscal year, resident tuition to attend UW-Platteville was $2,676. Tuition then continued to increase every year to $6,298 in the 2013-2014 fiscal year when the tuition freeze hit.

While tuition increased, state contributions to UW-Platteville’s operating budget significantly decreased. From 2001 to 2014, state contributions dropped from 40.71 percent to 15.72 percent. This decline has left the institution with a higher percentage of tuition contributions to the operating budget from 22.2 percent to 31.06 percent over the same time span.

Cramer said that compared to other institutions in Illinois and Iowa, UW-Platteville remains price-competitive with TSI tuition despite the increase.

“Because we are an access institution and we want to remain affordable, from the perspective of being affordable for students, it’s a very good thing,” Cramer said. “The other states where I have looked at that have done tuition freezes, [there] has been more state money put in. Basically, it’s worth the freeze. And that has not happened in Wisconsin.” Cramer said.

The challenge now is that we’re in an environment where they’re also taking state funding, Cramer said.

The tuition freeze will affect faculty and students. Curry said that low enrollment courses and majors may be cut when it comes to a change in curriculum, but nothing has been decided. As for professors and the student’s quality of learning, Curry said that the university is trying to use more academic staff in place of tenure track professors as tenure track professors leave. Academic staff members teach more courses as part of their load and are also paid less.

“That’s one that’s kind of a hot topic. As far as the students see it, there will be the same number of instructors or more instructors, but fewer tenure track professors,” Curry said. “I think there will be some effects. Similar to the verbiage that we used when we had the tornado, we’ll have a “new normal.” There will be some services that suffer. Hopefully the students won’t see much of that. Hopefully it will all kind of be behind the scenes. It is a good opportunity for us to go through our efficiencies. There’s areas we can improve on and we’re trying to focus on those as well.”

“We need to position ourselves so we’re coming out of this very difficult time with these cuts behind us. So going forward, we can start making the best of the things that are really important,” Cramer said.