The Legislature on Thursday approved about $740 million in capital investments across the Universities of Wisconsin, including a new engineering building at UW-Madison that rallied massive industry support.
The Legislature also passed a bill that would funnel millions in tuition revenue back to UW system universities.
Both bills now head to Gov. Tony Evers’ desk for final approval.
The bills are part of the massive, controversial deal UW system President Jay Rothman and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, struck late last year that gives about $800 million in funding to the UW system in exchange for changes to the public university system’s diversity, equity and inclusion programming.
The deal required the Legislature to approve the capital funding and tuition revenue provisions by the end of the February legislative session.
People are also reading…
In a social media post Thursday, Rothman thanked the Legislature for supporting the bills.
“State partnership is critical as we aim to provide the education our students deserve and parents expect, and we are grateful to the Legislature for their support in moving these bills to the Governor today,” Rothman said in a post.
Signatures from Evers on the two bills would mean more than half of the deal’s provisions would be fulfilled. Those include a bill approved earlier this week that guarantees admission to UW system schools for Wisconsin high school students in the top percentages of their high school class and the release of pay raises for nearly 35,000 UW system employees that had been withheld.
Senate Bill 895 and Assembly Bill 921, if signed into law, amend the state’s capital budget plan to approve state borrowing for a new $347 million engineering building and renovations for three decades-old residence halls at UW-Madison.
The new engineering building was the UW system and UW-Madison’s top priority going into the last state budget.
The engineering college is in dire need of more space: Student growth has stagnated as the college has run out of room; lab-stealing and physical space constraints are persistent problems for a college bursting at the seams. In the basement of Engineering Hall, space to store high-power magnetic motors is nearly maxed out.
In a social media post, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the bipartisan votes for the project “strengthen our university and support innovation.”
The bill also provides $78.4 million to repair the façades on two of UW-Whitewater’s aging academic buildings and $45.4 million to demolish uninhabitable buildings, including facilities at UW-Madison, UW-Platteville, UW-Eau Claire and UW-Green Bay.
Senate Bill 161 and Assembly Bill 140 make changes to the Minnesota-Wisconsin tuition reciprocity agreement so that the UW system gets to keep more of the tuition money paid by Minnesota students who attend UW schools, which under current law is deposited in the state’s general fund. UW-Madison and some of the farthest-west campuses in the UW system, where most Minnesota students attend, could stand to gain hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in tuition.
In the 2021-22 academic year, Minnesota students attending UW schools paid more than $26 million in tuition over Wisconsin’s in-state rate. Of that, $13.6 million was collected by UW-Madison.
UW-River Falls in northwestern Wisconsin, about a 20-minute drive from the Minnesota border, has the highest percentage of Minnesota students among the UW campuses, 43%. In 2021-22, it forked over the second-highest amount of Minnesota student tuition, $4.3 million.
Thursday’s legislative action means only one of the DEI deal’s time-sensitive provisions still needs to be approved — the release of $32 million that the state’s budget-writing committee held back from the UW system’s budget this summer. The Joint Finance Committee said the UW system could only recoup that money if the system reallocated those dollars to address the state’s workforce shortages.