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Working on some shared governance tasks this evening, and time with this data  really got me thinking. For the first time, probably in UW-Madison's history, we are enrolling more legacy students than first-generation students.   Enrollment of Wisconsin residents is at an historic low, while enrollment of international students is at an historic high. Enrollment is a function of applications, admit rates, and yield. Arguably, changes in policies around cost and campus climate (e.g. the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates-- see below) most often affect the yield. So let's look at the yield rates-- the percent of students who accept the admissions offer and choose to attend Madison.  They are quite stable for some groups, but declining for others. By the numbers, of the 6,279 new freshmen who enrolled at UW-Madison in 2012: 1,119 are children of parents who attended UW-Madison 1,033 do not have a college-educated parent    609 are not from the United States ...

As expected, the UW Regents moved forward Friday, approving the proposal from the UW-Madison Administration to raise the cap on out-of-state enrollment even though it hadn't been vetted through proper shared governance channels.  The cap was moved from 25% to 27.5%, rather than to 30% as requested. In typical style, everyone involved acted like this represented the wise, informed choice arrived at through careful decision-making. Of course, we have real choices given the "new normal," a context so normalized at this point that the vast majority of our campus intellectuals can't even see that "normal" is a political agenda. But as I constantly work to help my students understand, there is always  a choice. And the lack of careful thought being paid by the state and its universities to this particular choice could easily come at the expense of Wisconsin residents. Sure, there are other options.  Let's consider the range of possibilities. Assumptions 1. Unl...

UW-Madison is bringing a proposal before the UW System Board of Regents this week to change the cap on the percentage of undergraduates from out-of-state from 25 to 30%. In this post, I'm going to focus on the factual basis for the proposal itself.  I'm not going to speak to the process through which it was brought to the Regents, which I am fairly certain violated shared governance. I'm just going to examine the veracity of statements the UW-Madison Administration has made in support of this proposal using publicly available data.   I think the numbers alone suggest a need for further consideration before any decisions can be made . This motion should be tabled . In its proposal, Madison makes the following remarks: 1. The UW Admissions Policy counts Minnesota residents -- who receive tuition reciprocity--  in a separate category, and thus they are not counted as either residents or non-residents.  This is uncommon.  It means that the percent of out-...