Bucky Badger will make you a promise. If you have the grades and the scores and the luck to get into the University of Wisconsin, and if your family’s income is less than the median, Bucky will give you free tuition and cover your fees.
Under “Bucky’s Tuition Promise,” a program touted by UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank last week, all Wisconsin families with an income less than the median of $56,000 are eligible for the program.
Of course, it’s a good idea. Blank points out that the program might have the most value for lower-income rural families who have high assets in a family farm but low farm incomes. That, in turn, might serve to stem some of the resentment aimed at the UW and maybe even Madison itself.
But there is a little less here than meets the eye. For one thing, 70 percent of families below the median income already get financial aid that amounts to free tuition. And, if anything, the UW is slow to the dance as six other Big Ten schools already have a similar program. (By the way, there are 14 schools in the Big Ten. This should be a topic of study in the math department or maybe philosophy —which four schools don’t actually exist? — or, probably most appropriately, marketing.)
And here’s the thing that struck me the hardest. The program will only cost $3 million a year and, Blank stressed, not a dime of it will come from taxpayers.
I have two questions: Why aren’t we investing 10 times as much to reach more families and why aren’t I, as a taxpayer, paying for it?
Because, ya know, I’m sending a chunk of change to Foxconn and, if the governor, gets his way, maybe to Kimberly Clark as well. The awful Foxconn deal will cost state taxpayers up to $3 billion and it’s actually north of $4 billion if you add in all the largesse the company is getting from all public entities.
But Blank, no slouch when it comes to politics, apparently found it to be a political imperative to make it clear that she had found private funding sources for the program. It will be paid for by private contributions and some licensing fees.
Apparently, she read the political winds as favoring billions in direct taxpayer payments to a giant corporation but opposing a relative pittance to help lower-income Wisconsin families afford a decent education. Foxconn gets to install two pipelines in Racine County; one to siphon water from Lake Michigan and the other to pour in tax dollars from Madison. Meanwhile, “Bucky’s Promise” is paid for through the equivalent of bake sales.
At the very same meeting, Blank talked about Foxconn’s interest in investing in the UW’s research into artificial intelligence, automated vehicles and cancer. That’s great, but also ironic. Would state legislators invest directly in any of that research? No, they’ve cut the UW’s budget for years and provided it with only a modest increase in the last budget.
But Foxconn can essentially recycle some of its state taxpayer handout, give it to the UW for things the UW should be able to afford to do anyway, and get credit for it. It’s like giving your kid $100 to go buy you a Father’s Day present. Honey, that was so thoughtful! You shouldn’t have!
All of this just highlights the messed up priorities of our current politics and policies. Billions for billionaires; bake sales for Bucky and his promise.
