Chancellor Mark Mone details upcoming budget cuts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

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University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone raised the possibility Monday that the UW System may ask for a "modest" tuition increase in the next biennial budget following a four-year freeze to resident undergrad tuition.

Mone made that statement during a forum on the UWM campus to discuss the progress of budget cuts being made for the 2015-'17 biennium, totaling roughly $40 million.

"The question going forward is: will we see any relief?" Mone told faculty, staff and students. "The question for the next biennium is will we receive the flexibility to have a modest tuition increase?"

Mone said he's on the UW System's Tuition Task Force, which is working on policy for the UW System Board of Regents to consider as a guide for future tuition requests.

"We're operating with the assumption that we will be able to work with the Legislature and the governor to have some type of modest tuition increase," Mone said. "I have to tell you it seems very politically popular to keep a tuition freeze in place."

It's realistic to believe that the UW System will not be allowed to raise in-state undergraduate tuition, Mone said, "but we have to continue to plan, continue to communicate the importance of this."

"... It's an artificial constraint after four years to have maintained basically a price freeze, a budgetary freeze and a decline when your costs realistically go up every year," Mone said.

Last year, UW System's payroll stayed the same or increased slightly, despite having 763 fewer positions than the previous year across all campuses, Mone said. Health care costs, utility costs, deferred maintenance and technology costs all are going up, he said.

Mone said he also was committed to increasing faculty and staff compensation so that UWM could retain its best faculty and the top-tier research classification it recently received from the Carnegie Foundation.

If another cut the magnitude of the 2015-'17 cut of $250 million happens to the UW System in the 2017-'19 budget cycle, Mone speculated it would be "a tipping point" requiring four-year campuses to consolidate or regionalize.

That already has happened with the 13 two-year campuses, which are now divided into four regions with four deans, rather than a dean for each campus, Mone said.

"That's just my speculation on how close we are to that," the chancellor said.

Mone was asked during the forum about whether there had been a concerted effort to reduce academic program duplication across campuses.

"The question of duplication becomes quickly political," Mone said. "Every school — every university within UW System — often is the largest employer and has major impact within their areas."

While it's true that eliminating a major on a campus to reduce duplication could save money, it couldn't happen quickly because students in those programs must be allowed to complete degrees already in progress, Mone said.

The UWM chancellor said that before he became chancellor, he often said "wouldn't it be better for the UW System — us — to collaboratively figure that out as opposed to that being done legislatively or politically from different views, which is to some extent, what could happen?"