While Republicans are decrying the recently approved 2% UW tuition hike that Regents call “balanced and modest,” a new report from a UW-Madison think tank argues the university’s in-state tuition isn’t high enough.
The Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy recently issued a report making the case that tuition at UW-Madison is too low, reflecting “a legacy of political price control” rather than actual market value.
The latest system-wide tuition increase is the fourth in a row after a decade of a state-imposed freeze. Republicans have spoken out against the tuition hike, which comes after the Universities of Wisconsin system received $256 million in extra state aid in the latest budget.
But authors say despite the fact that the “debate treats this as a hardship; the data show the opposite.”
UW-Madison’s resident fees and tuition of $12,166 per academic year are the 12th lowest among the 38 public members of the Association of American Universities and below the median of $14,726 for the AAU, the report shows. Authors note UW-Madison’s “research peers” charge up to 73% more, arguing that even with the 2% tuition increase, it remains “a top-ranked public university priced as if it were a middling one.”
With the university’s nonresident tuition set at $44,191 per year, residents pay about 28 cents on the dollar compared to the non-subsidized rate, according to the report. Authors say that’s the fourth-lowest in the AAU, while the difference of about $32,000 is among the largest of the group.
They argue this “below-market” price is regressive, “subsidizing well-off families at the expense of taxpayers” whose children don’t attend the university.
“The remedy is to let market forces set resident tuition: benchmark it to peers and the nonresident price, index it to inflation, and pair higher tuition with need-based aid,” they wrote.
The argument is based in part on the private return of a bachelor’s degree from the university, calculated at about $760,000 over the course of a resident graduate’s career.
“It makes more sense for students to pay for that education than to shift the burden onto the taxpayer, so resident tuition should be governed by market forces, not by recurring political control,” authors wrote.
