Cuts to Wisconsin’s campuses, checks for consultants

The UW System’s corporate plan is clear: pay consulting firms millions while laying off educators, and closing programs and campuses.

The University of Wisconsin System doesn’t seem to be able to say no to corporate salespeople. As reporter Sara Gabler revealed last month in a WORT-FM radio investigation, in 2023 alone, the UW System spent $240 million on private contracts. For a frame of reference, this is more than three times what the UW System spent on private contractors just 20 years ago. And a lot of that money is going to consulting firms. Since 2013, the UW System has paid Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group $121 million and Deloitte over $8.5 million. 

The system spent a significant percentage of those funds to pay Huron for implementing the new administrative software Workday. According to the UW System, Workday will “standardize finance, human resources, and research administration processes at every university—with the goal of refocusing staff time on our missions of teaching, research, and outreach.” In other words, it has nothing to do with providing education.  

And at least some of the money contracted with Deloitte—$2.8 million, according to a previous report—was spent on the very reports that have been the basis of “rightsizing” UW campuses.      

At the same time, since 2023, the UW System has announced it will close or has closed five two-year schools around the state by the end of the 2024-25 school year, and has ended in-person instruction at a sixth.  Further, the UW System has ordered numerous comprehensive campuses (the 11 teaching-focused, four-year campuses around the state, as distinct from research campuses like UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee) to eliminate millions of dollars from their budgets in what amounts to a preemptive austerity measure. Ken Brosky vividly captured the closing of two-year campuses in his recent documentary, Closure, which should be required viewing for all those interested in the future of the UW System. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the film.) The film makes a strong case that budget cuts and bad institutional decisions led to multiple closures.        

But where is all this headed anyway? To understand why our campuses are being squeezed while we enrich private firms, one must consider the corporate view of higher education that the Republican Party and the UW System have outlined in considerable detail. This view includes narrowing of curricular options at the comprehensive campuses; the acquisition of as many technology-related products as possible; and the massive expansion of online education. These priorities both reflect and advance the overarching corporate goal of austerity and the increased privatization of public higher education.     

These priorities have been fully articulated in several publicly available sources. Two of the most instructive of these sources are the May 2021 Roth Report, produced by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges, and UW System President Jay Rothman’s infamous email to chancellors on September 1, 2023 obtained through a records request by UW-Madison’ student journalists at The Daily Cardinal.  

The Roth Report provided a detailed plan for curricular narrowing, euphemistically called “campus specialization.” And one of the many lessons Rothman suggested to chancellors based on a 2023 Chronicle Of Higher Education case study of budget cutting at Arkansas’ Henderson State University was to “[c]onsider shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low income students.” Published at the height of the pandemic in 2021, the Roth Report also outlined the corporate playbook for online education in almost cartoonish terms. Under the heading “Boost Digital Learning,” the report goes on for 10 pages about how incredibly popular—according to the authors anyway—online education is.  The report also affirmed the need for “innovation, major investment, and a system-wide approach by the UW System in order to become competitive in this [online education] space.”   

While a massive shift to online education necessitates significant spending on technology, prioritizing technology for administrative purposes was also one of the “lessons” outlined in President Rothman’s 2023 email, which encouraged chancellors to “invest in technology to ensure efficient operations (e.g, that the institution’s enrollment and tuition payment functions are effective).” 

In education, technology isn’t seen as a cost. Rather, the education establishment sees tech as a utility, like electricity and water. But unlike utilities, which we are all encouraged to conserve, in education, we continually buy more technology, with each new product promoted as the real game-changer.  

None of this agenda can be sold. Few people want online education beyond those selling it and the powerful people who wouldn’t get near it for themselves or their kids. But when it comes to education for the masses, these individuals have taken a “let them eat virtual cake” position on remote/digital/e- or whatever this week’s term is for online education.  

And regarding his private suggestion about liberal arts majors, President Rothman and the UW System were on defense immediately after the Daily Cardinal story broke. Rothman stated on Twitter: “Let me be crystal clear: I have not asked our universities to move away from liberal arts programs. I have repeatedly stated that the liberal arts develops critical thinking and problem solving skills vital to a knowledge economy and to winning the war for talent.” 

The comprehensive campuses were called “comprehensive” for a reason. Most students do not want or are unable to attend either UW-Madison or UW-Milwaukee. They need to attend college closer to their home, and so the comprehensive campuses have traditionally offered a full range of programs for students to access in any corner of the state. As a result, a significant majority of all students in the UW System have traditionally enrolled at the 11 comprehensive campuses. 

And apparently students and their parents know the job market much better than policy makers. The labor market today is as diverse today as it has ever been. STEM and technical jobs constitute a tiny fraction of the overall labor market, making a broad range of majors far more useful in the real economy for our students, not to mention the many benefits of comprehensive education for our students as democratic citizens and human beings.  

The corporate higher education agenda— like the corporate agenda for k-12 education—is incredibly unpopular.  Thus, this agenda has to be imposed.  And failure to impose it in the “near term,” to use the Roth Report’s language, could lead to “more dire consequences in the long term, such as the closure of several university campuses and the deterioration of the reputation our institutions have today.” 

Similarly, another of Rothman’s “lessons” for chancellors was to “[m]ake the ‘painful’ cuts and adjustments at one time and then move on” and urging them to “not procrastinate in making the ‘difficult’ decisions.”

Understandably, neither Rothman nor the Regents want to travel around the state and give speeches to groups of taxpaying Wisconsin citizens—many of whose children attend or plan to attend UW comprehensive schools—outlining the corporate agenda for the UW System. 

But should anyone in the UW System try to publicly defend this agenda, below is my first crack at their comments:   

“Hello, residents of [fill in location here]. We would like to talk to you about how we see the future of the UW System. We want to continue to spend untold tens of millions on technology and consulting. To do so, we will need to cut about a third or more of the programs available at UW-[fill in location here]. No worries! Students in this region and all over the state will be able to study these majors in the future at UW-Madison or maybe Milwaukee. Or they can always study them ONLINE, through the new and improved UW online portal. The kids just LOVE online learning! Really! I read it in the higher ed press!!! Anyway, this plan for the UW System is innovative and future-focused! I bet your young children will be THRILLED to learn that this is their future!!!”  

Given the challenging politics of its corporate agenda, then, the UW seems determined to impose curricular narrowing and eventually online education by means of budget cutting and scare tactics about a non-existent—but always pending—demographic crisis. All the while, System leaders do not appear interested in defending their excessive spending, ignoring WORT’s requests for comment for its December 2024 story.     

The imposition of the corporate higher education agenda has gone into overdrive since the end of the pandemic. Much to the chagrin of those seeking a rapid makeover of higher education, the economic crisis of the pandemic was short lived. Making matters far worse, many states (including, of course, Wisconsin), had significant budget surpluses. These inconvenient facts dictated a new political strategy on the part of corporations seeking to fundamentally remake higher education quickly.   

Hence the birth of the horrible-sounding term “structural deficits” presumably facing many of our campuses. These deficits, we are told, need to be addressed now, and all the numbers and graphics for this “rightsizing” project were provided by Deloitte for a few million dollars. But who’s counting a few million more consultant dollars ?      

Now, one would think that if the “structural deficits” facing UW campuses were so devastating, wouldn’t they have been featured prominently in the Republicans’ 2021 playbook for the UW System, the Roth Report? Yet “structural deficits” do not get mentioned at all—not once—in the Roth report’s 91 pages. In fact, the 2021 report doesn’t even talk about individual campus deficits at all.

Instead, Roth was also framed largely in terms of the massive demographic crisis that’s always been imminent but never quite seems to arrive. Many pages of the report were dedicated to the pending population catastrophe that necessitated curricular narrowing and online education, because, presumably, no one was going to go to college in the future. Wisconsin, despite increasing in population, was set to become a vast wasteland of Mad Max proportions. 

There is no real, meaningful discussion of policies and priorities in the UW System. Rather, UW System policy makers simply solicit the views of CEOs, consultants, and ed tech vendors, all of whom represent their own interests. And the sky is blue.  

We hear how our campuses are going broke at a time when we’re spending hundreds of millions on consultants and technology and the state is running a record surplus. We hear that our enrollment has tanked—or is about to tank—or might tank at some point in the future—at a time when official enrollment is up for the second consecutive year across the UW System and at numerous campuses and the state continues to grow in population. 

Meanwhile, we hear almost nothing about online education because industry and policy makers have basically given up trying to sell it to the citizenry. Instead, ed tech firms are relying on higher education administrators to do the dirty work and break the bad news to the population: only the privileged will get face-to-face instruction in the future.  

Good luck with that. If I were delivering that message, I’d bring an armed escort just in case.   

Meanwhile, the UW System—like all higher ed—just keeps buying every tech-related product and service it can get its hands on. Our platforms have their own platforms.  

The UW System is trying mightily to implement a corporate agenda seeking to turn our campuses into narrowed, tech-heavy student processing centers. To do this, System leaders talk only in “we’re going broke and we’ll never get any more public funding and we better cut zillions of dollars immediately to prepare for a future with no college students at all because no one’s having babies any more” terms. Over and over and over again.  

Like President Rothman told chancellors, “make the ‘painful’ cuts and adjustments one time and move on.”

To the UW System’s leadership: Please state your priorities in public and defend them. Tell us what you think about technology and consulting expenses at a time when faculty and staff are being laid off, and countless vacant faculty and staff positions are going unfilled so we can buy more technology and consulting products and services.   

Tell us how much, for example, Workday—a platform owned by a publicly traded firm—will cost the UW System annually, and whether you believe that having this software is more important than all students across the state having access to a broad range of programs at their local comprehensive university.  

And while you’re at it, tell us about all the people in your families who have attended higher education online. Or K-12 online for that matter. 

Let’s have a real discussion about the purposes and priorities of the UW System. A discussion that places the education of students and the real economy at the center. 

A discussion that acknowledges that every nickel spent by the UW System is a political choice, a choice that could be otherwise.