Frederica Freyberg:
In education news, the number of UW two-year campuses going to on-line classes instead of in-person instruction has risen to three. At West Bend, Fond du Lac and Marinette. UW-Richland has closed altogether. The Marinette campus is part of UW-Green Bay and its chancellor, Michael Alexander, says the writing was on the wall, what with declining enrollment and competition for students from the nearby Northeast Wisconsin Technical College.

Michael Alexander:
There has to be access points to education. UW-Green Bay has to have a presence in northern Wisconsin. And we’re investing in the high schools there, to be clear. So with our rising phoenix program and other things that we do, our students particularly who are interested in college to get them a head start on the college experience, to be able to offer classes that the high schools might not otherwise be able to offer with a smaller population in the high school. Right? These are things that we absolutely are trying to do to help that region. Because it does matter. Right? We can’t look at the problem and just throw our hands up. We have to find a way to actually make it better and that’s what we’re trying to do here. And, again, I go back to the NWTC issue. Right? We think a little differently about this sometimes, but I want to be clear, if most of those classes, if not all of those classes, those 14 classes, there’s a class that’s pretty much being identically taught by NWTC. Why are we duplicating our educational resources in an area that is harder to serve because of how spread out it is with the number of people that are there and the population? You’ve got to think differently about how we access — give access to those people who want it.

Frederica Freyberg:
So what does the closure of two-year campuses to in-person classes across Wisconsin mean for access and degree attainment for students? We check in with a national non-partisan, nonprofit group MDRC, and its research associate in the area of rural higher education, Alyssa Ratledge. Thanks very much for being here.

Alyssa Ratledge:
Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
So you have written that rural colleges matter. How so?

Alyssa Ratledge:
Rural colleges are often the only access point to higher education post-secondary training and workforce training for people who live in rural areas. Many people living in rural areas are simply unable to move away to go to college and they do not always have on-line access to be able to take up on-line offerings. So the ability to go to a college and, again, these might be distant, we might be traveling 25, 50, even a hundred miles to college, but it still means folks can stay where they are from, where their families are located. When you are closing campuses, it can be really challenging for those folks to continue to engage or to achieve the postsecondary credential that they’re interested in.

Frederica Freyberg:
Because in the end, what happens when there are what you call education deserts?

Alyssa Ratledge:
Education deserts have a chilling effect on students’ likelihood of going to college, but also importantly, their likelihood of completing college. Nationally, most students who are attending college are doing so within about 25 miles of their home. It’s not really these days the traditional sense of being 18 and going off to college and living on campus. These days, most college students are commuting and a lot of them particularly in the two-year space are attending part-time, and today’s college student is much older than the traditional conception. Those folks are not going to pick up and leave. They often have families and jobs and responsibilities, nor do they want to leave. Oftentimes we hear that our rural folks want to stay where they are, contribute to the local community, and having workforce training or a college degree can help them do that in a meaningful way if they’re able to access it.

Frederica Freyberg:
So the UW-Green Bay two-year branch in Marinette is going mostly on-line. Doesn’t that still afford access to rural students?

Alyssa Ratledge:
There are many rural students for whom on-line access is going to be enough. And when we think about our students who are coming out of high school, have good access, have good knowledge of the internet, yes, that can be a good option for them. However, there are going to be a lot of folks that are not going to be able to take that up. Oftentimes that’s older folks or people who are living in very remote and rural fringe locations where they simply don’t have reliable broadband or, in some places, don’t have internet access at all. There are still parts of the country without reliable internet access and many of the on-line course offerings are going to require a high-speed connection or the ability to download documents that just is out of reach for people who are living really off the grid.

Frederica Freyberg:
So what about the fact that for the campuses that are realigning or even closing, the problem is really low enrollment, which makes maintaining the whole kind of campus infrastructure untenable. Doesn’t it make sense to basically downsize for the university system?

Alyssa Ratledge:
It may make sense if there’s not a willingness to invest in supporting those campuses at the state level, yes, it can be an untenable situation when you look at the bottom line and the budgets. That is ultimately a philosophical question we have to grapple with. Right? Are we willing to fund places that we are going to be seeing budgets really struggling to make ends meet given the reduction in students at the cost of potentially some of those students are going to struggle with or be unable to complete a college degree, if that location is closed.

Frederica Freyberg:
So a recent paper from the Federal Reserve discussed how employment and manufacturing in the agricultural sectors has decreased in Wisconsin over the past 10 years. Where does that leave people who haven’t upskilled for a changing economy, especially in rural parts of our state?

Alyssa Ratledge:
Yeah. It is an enormous challenge. It’s a great question. We see this in a lot of places across the country, where natural resource economies or agricultural economies are changing and we also know that it is harder than ever for agricultural workers and family farms to make ends meet. At the same time, there is an additional technological component to many of those jobs that could be greatly benefited from some additional workforce training or technological training. So leaving folks in those areas without access to that training can make it really difficult for them to compete in a changing economy. This is especially true for those folks and those communities where people want to stay where they are. Right? There’s always the option, of course, to move to a big city, but that just continues to hollow our rural towns and counties out. So if we want to keep the sustainable economy in these places, we need to figure out how we can support folks to be able to afford and completely upskilling, whether that’s a traditional college degree or a trade certificate or workforce training.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right. We leave it there. Alyssa Ratledge, thanks very much.

Alyssa Ratledge:
Thank you.