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But “it’s not about the university,” Reilly said in an interview Friday after a visit to La Crosse. It’s about what Wisconsin needs the university to do to make the state more economically competitive.
University officials have said if the Assembly version of the budget is passed, it would force layoffs of staff members, thousands of classes to be canceled in the spring semester and enrollment caps in some major fields of study.
Legislative leaders are negotiating a budget compromise now, and Reilly said he has been traveling around the state encouraging people to contact their legislators.
In La Crosse, Reilly attended a reception Thursday with faculty, staff and students, and then a dinner for campus leaders and community members. Friday morning, he met with the Chancellor Joe Gow’s community council.
Community members need to “send the message that the university is really important to them, and that the targeted, specific, reasonable growth agenda reinvestment we’re asking for is what the state needs to have the university do for it,” Reilly said.
They “can send that message far more effectively than those of us who are on the payroll,” he said.
The Assembly and Senate versions of the budget both contain some money for UW-La Crosse’s Growth and Access plan, which would create 130 new faculty and staff jobs, expand enrollment by 1,000 and raise tuition at UW-L.
“It’s an out-of-the-box proposal,” Reilly said of the plan. “I think it’s got legs and potential. It’s in the Senate version of the budget and it’s in the Assembly version of the budget in different forms. And presumably it’s part of what they’re talking about now,” Reilly said.
Growing the university is “critically important to the state” because at 25.5 percent, Wisconsin lags behind the national average (27.5 percent) and Minnesota (32 percent) in residents with a college degree, Reilly said.
“We cannot let that trend continue and hope to be competitive in the upper Midwest and certainly nationally and internationally,” he said.
States with more college graduates also have higher per-capita incomes, Reilly said.
“Ten years ago, we and Minnesota were basically tied. Same percentage of college degree-holders in the state. Pretty much the same per-capita income. Ten years later, they’ve jumped out 7 percentage points ahead of us, and per-capita income in Minnesota is $4,000 more than ours,” he said.
“It’s not rocket science. I think we know what we need to do. But we have to convince the public and the legislators that unless we do that we have a grim future for our kids and grandkids in this state. We won’t be competitive,” he said.
The university has had significant cuts in the last three biennial budgets, Reilly said.
“We can’t keep doing that and hope and believe we’ll be competitive as a state in a knowledge economy where we as a state and a country will compete at the high-order skill end of the market, not the low-water skill end, because our wage structure won’t let us compete at that end.”
Reid Magney can be reached at (608) 791-8211 or rmagney@lacrossetribune.com.
