Dean's Message

Get your best start on a bachelor's degree and unlimited career opportunities by taking freshman and sophomore general education courses at UW-Waukesha. You'll find the lowest tuition in the UW System classes scheduled both days and evenings and fully qualified faculty. This makes UW-Waukesha the best choice for many students.

Dean's Message

Every once in a while, when I’m out in the community, I’m asked a question: Why should I give money to UW-Waukesha? I pay my taxes—what more do you want?

Here’s what I tell them: A private college depends heavily on its students for support. A small college with a modest endowment derives almost 100% of its budget from tuition. If the school needs more money, it has only a few sources to look to: it can increase enrollment, which might mean spending a lot of money marketing itself; it can increase tuition, which hits students in the pocketbook, and tends to limit higher education to the well-to-do; it can seek grants, but not only does that put it in competition with every other school in the country, grants have been drying up for a number of years; or it can go out and raise funds from individual donors.

While public higher education in Wisconsin depended in part on those same sources, our major source of income was from the state budget. Wisconsinites for many, many years recognized public higher education not only as a public good but a great public investment. The “ROI”—Return On Investment—from public higher education was extraordinary. Spreading the burden of supporting public higher education to all the citizens and all the enterprises in the state made great sense. Wisconsin citizens could look at their public colleges and universities and know that they were sources of prosperity and pride. A few years back, though, the state began to fall on hard times. One of the responses was a cut in state support for public higher education; throughout the UW system, the burden began to shift to the students. There’s a rueful acknowledgement of that shift in a well-known saying in higher education: “We went from state-supported to state-assisted to state-located.” We’re not at the “state-located” phase of this saying yet in Wisconsin. But the balance has shifted from the majority of our support coming from the state budget to a majority coming from our students, in the form of tuition. We’re now up to about 62% of our academic programs budget coming from our students, with 38% coming from state taxes. In 2002-2003, those percentages were almost exactly reversed.

It’s become harder for our students to pay for an education. That means fewer students from lower-income families are coming to UW-Waukesha. The doors to opportunity are slowly closing across the state.

And so we turn to private citizens who understand that the dollars they give for scholarships and program support are wise investments. We look to people like you who understand that a dollar given today means a brighter tomorrow for everybody and that public higher education is the infrastructure of the future.

Please join me and make a contribution to the UW-Waukesha Foundation. Your donation provides assistance to local students. Contact Foundation Executive Director Lillian Boese at (262) 446-3328 for more information about helping to educate the next generation of leaders at UW-Waukesha. Please help us to give these students and Wisconsin a bright future.

Patrick Schmitt, Campus Dean