MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman is nearly finished touring all 13 campuses across Wisconsin.
It’s a promise he made in his first 100 days.
“We’ve also done 100 student profiles in my first 100 days and I was able to interview a number of those students,” he said. “You heard what these students are doing, and it’s really incredible.”
Since taking the leadership role on June 1, Rothman also made a monumental announcement. The Wisconsin Tuition Promise will launch in the fall of 2023 and continue through 2024. The initiative aims to help roughly 8,000 low-income Wisconsin students afford a college degree at a UW institution.
The UW-System would fund the initiative in 2023 and a request has been made for the legislature to fund it in 2024.
Eligible students and their families would need to have an income of $62,000 or less.
“This excludes UW-Madison, which already has Bucky’s Tuition Promise and this initiative was modeled after that,” Rothman said. “There’s still housing and all the other costs associated with going to college, but this takes tuition off the table.”
Rothman is the UW-System’s ninth president, succeeding Tommy Thompson. He previously was the CEO and chairman of the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP in Milwaukee.
He oversaw 1,100 employees in 26 different offices in the U.S. and overseas.
“A law firm is a nonhierarchical organization where you affect change by building consensus, by listening and talking to people, by hearing new ideas and having your perspective change over time and then evolving to the right path forward,” he said. “As I was looking at this opportunity, my sense was the UW-System is a lot like that.”
As Rothman prepares to tackle his first year as president, he has a long list of things he’d like to accomplish. Two of them include modernizing aging infrastructure on UW campuses and increasing pay for staff.
“We have to be reinvesting in those buildings so we have modern classrooms and lab facilities,” he said. “Over the past 10 years or so, we have not been paying as competitively as we should be.”
A request for higher compensation for faculty and staff has been put into this biennial budget. It would be 4% for 2023 as well as for 2024.
This would need to be revisited in the next biennial budget.
Another crucial area of focus for Rothman is making sure Wisconsin’s public universities remain accessible and affordable.
As the war for talent continues across the country, Rothman said UW-System has an obligation to the state to fill those jobs.
“If those employers do not have access to talent, they’ll move their jobs out of Wisconsin,” he said. “That’s not good.”
Rothman said a strategic plan is also in the works for the UW-System. The intent is to present it to the Board of Regents at the end of September.