Online education is a key part of the UW System’s austerity agenda

For UW leadership and corporate interests, “distance learning” goes hand-in-hand with cuts to programs and campuses. 

Austerity—the gradual, intentional reduction of public funding for public services—is the overarching goal of corporate America when it comes to public higher education. Over several decades, the policy of austerity has made public higher education dependent on student tuition, and, as a result, far more expensive than before. Now, corporations are conveniently selling us the solution to the budget problems they created in the form of online education. As Anand Giridharadas reminds us, arsonists make the best firefighters. 

In Wisconsin, rather than push back against the austerity imposed by the Legislature, the UW System has acquiesced to its own defunding, a pattern that’s led to the closure of several two year campuses, including the recent announcement of the closure of the UW-Oshkosh, Fox Cities campus on June 30, 2025. In this way, UW President Jay Rothman’s tenure differs little from that of Ray Cross, the Republican-appointed System President who served from 2014 to 2019. And the way corporations and the wealthy frame it, the entire discussion of the UW’s budget proceeds as if it is not a political decision at all. 

The austerity governing the UW System has been made clear in the recent reports by the consulting firm Deloitte about several UW comprehensive universities. Distinct from the research universities of UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, the comprehensives are the 11, teaching-focused four-year campuses located in every part of the state that have traditionally offered a broad array of programs. The UW System paid Deloitte $2.8 million at a time when campuses are being directed by the UW System to cut their budgets substantially, or, in the language of Deloitte, “right-size.” 

Austerity has helped powerful corporate actors advance another key priority: A massive increase in online education. Online education is very big business. There are over 160,000 students enrolled in the UW System, and increasing online courses for even a fraction of these students can be extremely lucrative for the ed tech sector. Online education also justifies the closure of programs, schools, and campuses, which is precisely the goal of many corporate interests when it comes to their instinctive advocacy for more technology in education. 

As austerity drives more online education, online education drives more austerity. “We have to go online because the state will no longer fund us,” is the type of reasoning offered by higher education administrators. Then once a significant increase in online education is imposed, higher education policy makers will likely ask: “Why should the state continue to fund all these campuses when so much is being done online?” 

But as I discovered while writing my 2023 book The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, And The Education Reform Movement, defunding education and continually adding more technology has never been a winning message. The public well understands that education is a social process, and it’s hard to be social on a screen. As a result, industry has always sold increasing technology in education as a means of expanding economic opportunity. 

This seemingly ideologically progressive framing persists despite the unquestioned business practice of minimizing the wages of all but the highest earners. Still, industry sells online education to policymakers as the ticket to opportunity for the masses, as if there will be fewer jobs in home health care, retail, and food services if millions of people get online degrees. This is absurd on its face. 

Moreover, the pandemic revealed what industry has known for decades—online education is a tough sell in the marketplace. Thus, online education has had a never-ending list of monikers, including distance, digital, remote, e-, customized, individualized, and even curated learning. 

And as any seller of any product knows, the best way to convince the public that your product is the next big thing is to argue that your product already is a big thing. This is what the UW System has done with online education. For example, while promoting the UW System’s new marketing portal for online programs, Rothman told Wisconsin Public Radio that the UW “has 18,000 ‘traditional’ students who have now gone fully online,” a number equivalent to the total enrollment of several smaller UW campuses combined. 

When asked for explanation for this claim, however, UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch stated in an email that this number referred to “exclusively online students in fall 2023 and includes primarily undergraduate, graduate, and dual enrollment students,” a response that raises more questions than it answers. 

Online education also has the significant added benefit of advancing the corporate goal of narrowing the curriculum. In the UW System, this is euphemistically called “campus specialization,” in which campuses shed as many programs as possible, beginning, typically, with liberal arts majors. Austerity kills multiple birds, as the expression goes. 

 The business of online education is on full display in the new draft report by the UW, “Reimagining UW Extended Campus.” The report illustrates the commitment that the UW System has to online education, which is apparently exempt from right-sizing. One of the report’s appendices, entitled “Strategic Growth Initiative,” was submitted by the interest group UPCEA, which describes itself as the “online and professional education association.” UPCEA currently lists roughly 30 for-profit firms as “partners.” The UW System is very attentive to the needs of corporations. 

“Reimagining UW Extended Campus” follows multiple reports advocating permanent austerity and substantially increasing online education across the UW System, all of which reveal the extent to which corporate interests have completely captured higher education. In May 2020, just weeks into the pandemic and subsequent closure of both K-12 schools and college campuses, the UW System—run by Republican appointees —published the Blueprint for the University of Wisconsin System Beyond COVID-19. 

The Blueprint, assuming permanent austerity, argued that the UW System, facing “looming financial challenges,” the UW System “must” advance several major changes to “ensure the survival of its mission and universities,” including campus specialization and the creation of a “unified strategic online education delivery model.” 

In 2021, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Senate’s Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges followed up with an excruciatingly detailed version of the Blueprint in the form of the Roth Report, which again assumed permanent austerity, and advocated significantly increasing online education while shrinking campuses by forcing them to specialize.  

In the end, UW policy is a case study in how powerful interests get their way in politics. First, frame the issue: permanent austerity is presented not as the political choice that it is, but rather as inevitable, as if it’s value-free and couldn’t be otherwise. 

Then, once the assumption of permanent austerity becomes conventional wisdom, corporate priorities are imposed, beginning with online education and campus specialization. 

In Wisconsin and across the country, if the powerful get their way, online education within a narrowed curriculum will become understood as “just how higher education is now” for working-class and lower-income students. Meanwhile, face-to-face education in a broad array of fields will always be available to the more privileged students who attend flagship universities and private schools. 

This is what’s at stake in the UW System’s embarrassingly one-sided discussion of online education. Its current leadership appears religiously committed to permanent austerity and undermining the model of comprehensive education that has made the UW System the envy of the country for decades.