I grew up in a square-mile town in rural Wisconsin and I know every location mentioned in this piece on the UW system closing two-year liberal arts campuses. For years, rural, first-generation students began college on these campuses close to home before transferring to a four-year school.
The issues driving the closures are also very familiar: Devastating budget cuts to state universities, pressures to abandon the liberal arts for vocational training, policy makers demanding that campuses compete with one another for enrollment as the college-aged population grows smaller, abandonment of the long-standing mission of college access for first-generation students.
Jennifer Berkshire, the author, writes:
The winnowing of college options in states like Wisconsin reflects a larger story about inequality in higher education. Douglas Haynes is a professor of English at UW-Oshkosh and the author of “Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond,” a new book on higher education in the upper Midwest. He argues that while institutions that serve low-income and rural students are closing or being starved of resources, Wisconsin’s flagship university, UW-Madison, is able to offer its more affluent student body boundless opportunities. “People don’t realize the contrast between schools where programs are being cut and Madison where the world is your oyster,” says Haynes.
UW Madison has also faced state and federal budget cuts, but the resource gaps between regional and flagship campuses are very real in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
The students from my high school graduating class who did go to college overwhelmingly enrolled at one of the (then) relatively well-supported and affordable network of state schools. To the extent that I understood these things when I was 17, many people in my hometown understood that the University of Wisconsin was a valued state resource: for kids heading off to college, for the local farmers partnering on research projects, for educating our teachers and the nurses who cared for our dying elders and newborn babies, for the pride of college sports.
It's such a loss that no one is imagining alternatives for rural first-generation students beyond cost-cutting campus closures.
It is such a loss that campuses that had been so invested in their communities and in the future of the state were then framed by conservative legislators as greedy adversaries of the people.
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