Hintz on Budget and UW System

AT reporter Jessica Koehler covered a recent budget session by Gordon Hintz at UW Oshkosh on 4/30/07. You can read the entire story from 5/3 here. Coverage of Hintz included the following:

Rep. Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, said the open forum was meant to show the public where the state’s dollars have gone in the past, what the current budget proposal is for 2007-09, and how those changes affect students and faculty at UW-Oshkosh. “I’ve largely believed that we ask people to participate in elections, but rarely are decisions being made as they are affecting us,” Hintz said. “My goal is to put everybody in the decision-making seat.”

Hintz said the UW System is one of the top five general-purpose revenue programs funded by the states budget, but due to declining state support, students and staff at UW-Oshkosh have been negatively affected over the past few years. Hintz showed that during the 1992-93 school year, the state spent 11.1 percent of the budget on the University of Wisconsin. In 2006-07, the state spent only 8.0 percent of the budget on the UW System. Since 1991, tuition prices for the UW System, excluding UW-Madison, have gone up almost $3,000, and during the 2006-07 school year, students were paying more than half of their tuition on their own.

However, Hintz added that the budget proposal for 2007-09 includes additional funding for UW-Oshkosh for the first time several years. Hintz said the new budget proposal addresses the problems the campus and the city are facing. One goal of the proposal is called the UW-Oshkosh Growth Initiative, which allocates $2.6 million to raise the number of graduates in higher demanding programs at the university, such as biology, microbiology, medical technology, psychology and business.

Hintz said the initiative should aid in planning the budget and help the university to adapt to the way Wisconsin has evolved.“We’ve never been good at making long-term budget plans at the state level,” Hintz said. “Our revenue and tax system is built for an outdated economy. We’re moving toward a service economy. The global economy will require more graduates with bachelor degrees to keep up with the high-skilled jobs.”

Another goal of the UW-Oshkosh Growth Initiative is to increase the number of students on campus by 480 by the end of 2009, to help increase the number of adults with college degrees in Wisconsin. Hintz explained that Oshkosh would have to increase its annual degree production by 36.1 percent by 2025 to match some of the best-performing schools in the country. “Wisconsin lags in bachelor degree holders and that’s something that these budget proposals are aimed at,” Hintz said. “This is something we need to put in our goals of what higher education should provide. The state needs higher education to play a bigger role in increasing the skills of our citizens.”