UW-Madison alums lobby state Legislature for more money for operations, student housing

The university also wants bonding authority for new campus units

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The Universities of Wisconsin face an uphill battle in getting their $856 million budget proposal through the Legislature this budget season. Come Wednesday afternoon, they got an assist from Badger alums during UW-Madison’s annual Day at the Capitol event — help that university officials said is even more vital with ongoing federal instability.

“It just feels that we're being under siege a little bit, and that's a tough place to be for our students, our staff, our faculty, our sector,” UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said to the hundreds of alums gathered in the Madison Concourse Hotel. “It makes it even more important that we do see support at the state level as we're facing all of these federal challenges.”

University officials advised the alums, many clad in red and white, to lobby for three legislative priorities: an increase in funds for operations and employee retention, the ability to borrow money for facilities, including housing, without state legislative approval, and dollars to create new facilities and demolish and renovate aging ones. After a luncheon, the alumni were sent to the Capitol for pre-scheduled appointments with their legislators to advocate on Bucky’s behalf.

Perhaps bolstered by ongoing federal funding turmoil, turnout for the event was more than double last year, about 275 attendees compared to 125, says Tod Pritchard, senior director of media and public relations for the Wisconsin Alumni Association. That extra firepower may come in handy — Republican legislators have signalled that the UW system’s $856 million budget ask is unlikely to be approved.

“Republican legislative leaders have made it clear that they don't intend to invest that amount,” Crystal Potts, UW-Madison senior director of state relations and statewide outreach, told those at lobby day. Potts said messaging that focuses on “the need for additional investment to remain competitive” will be important going forward, because “depending on who you're talking to, that legislator might say, ‘I'm going to dump this entire proposal.’”

Building housing is among the university’s top current needs. UW-Madison officials say they need to build more on-campus units — and have developers build more off-campus ones — to accommodate steadily-growing class enrollments. According to an August 2024 study commissioned by the university, the average occupancy rate for off-campus rentals is 98%; the average on-campus rent is nearly $1,300 per bed per month, among the highest of any Big Ten university. Citywide, Madison has the third-lowest apartment vacancy in the country — behind Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City.

After Mnookin’s speech, three panelists — UW-Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen, Downtown Madison Inc. President Jason Ilstrup and UW-Madison Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning and Management Cindy Torstveit — spoke for around 30 minutes about the city and university’s housing challenges. 

Madison’s growth makes it an outlier statewide — though Wisconsin is projected to lose around 200,000 residents by 2050, the city of Madison projects it will gain 115,000 residents by the same year. Business in the biohealth and healthcare sectors is booming, but without housing solutions, the university and private sector companies in Dane County will face challenges attracting and retaining students and workers, the panelists said.

“We’ve grown jobs a lot faster than we’ve grown housing units,” said Paulsen. “[And] when you add more people faster than you add housing units, we squeeze the housing market.”

Worsening the issue, Ilstrup said, is the fact that 82% of in-state students who graduate from UW-Madison stay in Wisconsin, and the “significant growth in Gen Z populations” moving to the city. Madison is in the top 10 U.S. metro areas for Gen Z net migration, according to the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.

“Madison has gone from a capital city and a university town to a much more robust and diverse economy,” said Ilstrup. Epic Systems’ growth, alone, he added, has propelled “significant pressure” on the housing market — particularly downtown, where younger workers want to live.

“There are about 9,000-10,000 apartment units in the works right now in downtown,” Ilstrup said. “I'm going to tell you, folks, that's just not enough.”

And UW-Madison is quickly exhausting its options for adding new on-campus beds, said Torstveit. The university has already converted residence hall lounges and the Lowell Center — previously a campus hotel — into student housing, and most students living on-campus are sharing bedrooms. Around 9,000 students are crammed into the residence halls’ total capacity of 7,700, according to Pritchard.

“We won’t be able to keep that up much longer,” said Torstveit. “They want to live with us, we’re doing our very best, but there just isn’t the capacity there.”

Unlike other Big Ten universities, UW-Madison lacks the ability to borrow for and build housing or other capital projects without state legislative approval — what’s known as bonding authority. That’s another issue the university directed alums to push on. Torstveit tells Isthmus that the university’s lack of bonding authority means it moves more slowly on housing development than its competitors. 

Granting the university bonding authority would come at no cost to taxpayers, she adds; students’ housing fees would pay for the bonds.

“We're asking for program revenue-supported borrowing, which are [tax-exempt] bonds paid for by the fees that students pay for housing, and it's only if they choose to live with us,” says Torstveit. And there is no plan to increase fees to pay for the bonds, she adds: “We can do it with the current rates.”

Torstveit declined to speculate as to why the Republican-controlled Legislature opposes granting UW bonding authority. 

“I think they have their reasons,” Torstveit says. “All I can do is advocate for UW-Madison and the flexibility, and what it would mean to us to be able to build that infrastructure to meet these critical needs.”

Republican leaders have shown resistance to the idea. At a February fireside chat in Grainger Hall, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said opposition to bonding has historically come from concern that the state Legislature would “be the backstop” if a bond could not be repaid.

“We [would be] basically giving away the state's credit card and letting the university spend it, knowing that mom and dad eventually would pay for it,” Vos said.

Vos also argued that UW-Madison would influence project bids with “the ideology of the folks on campus, as opposed to the best interest of the state.”

“The cost of building [could be] doubled or tripled because we choose to put DEI requirements on construction, we choose to say, we're only going to use this kind of labor, we choose to say, we're only going to build on non-Indian land, whatever you want to say, right, all this crazy crap,” Vos said. 

“Wouldn’t you want the elected officials, who ultimately have to vote for the funding, be the ones that make the decision?” Vos added. “If that’s true, well then they can’t have bonding.”