Day Whatever

A brief note on the local news tonight. There was a tuition hike throughout the UW system. The station's online text and video reports are different from what I recall seeing on the air. I just wanted to reference the nomenclature here: "schools" versus "colleges" versus "campuses" or "universities." The UW system consists of a central administration, 26 campuses, UW Extension, UW Colleges Online, and maybe some other parts. The campuses include two institutions, UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, that grant graduate and professional degrees (each of which has numerous schools and colleges such as the UW School of Law, and UW-Milwaukee College of Letters and Sciences), 11 "comprehensive" campuses with 4-year schools, and the 13 "UW Colleges," which only have freshman and sophomore curricula. There are UW "Centers" in every county that lacks a comprehensive campus or doctoral insitution, which serve the Extension.

So what did the news say? The video online says "students at UW schools will pay more next year" and gives figures for undergrads in Milwaukee and Madison. "Schools" is at best ambiguous, and the sentence suggests all but could mean some. The text is better, clarifying that the increase does not affect the UW Colleges. In the report that I actually heard on TV, there was specific reference to an increase at "colleges" which is at best misleading.

Also, none of these reports, going back to the AP report or the UWS press release, captures the ways in which tuition varies among students at a campus. The press release and AP at least are precise enough to refer to resident undergraduates, whose tuition is lower than out-of-state students or grad students. But a majority of the comprehensive campuses charged differential tuition, attaching greater rates to students of particular schools and colleges. There are also segregated fees that vary by campus, which are paid as part of the tuition bill although they are not technically part of the tuition. And at least when I was a student, there was not just a flat fee to attend, regardless of the credit load. If you took an overload schedule of 21 credits, it cost more than auditing a one-credit summer class. So this idea that your tuition went up X dollars has a lot of built-in assumptions.