Ananth Seshadri on UW-Madison's Rankings and Research Funds

Zac Schultz:
Finally tonight, a new study from the UW-Madison Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy asks is the UW-Madison in decline? Joining us now is Ananth Seshadri, a professor of economics and co-author of the study. Thanks for your time today.

Ananth Seshadri:
Thank you for having me.

Zac Schultz:
Your paper looks at different rankings of UW-Madison programs compared to other universities and you’ve shown a significant decline in overall ranking since 2010. How do you come to that?

Ananth Seshadri:
Correct, so we look at four different measures of rankings. One is the very popular U.S. News and World Report college rankings of undergraduate programs. We look at rankings of doctoral programs. We look at R&D, research rankings. How much in terms of research and development money do we bring in, mainly from the federal government. And then finally, global rankings of universities. In the first ranking, we actually find in terms of America’s best colleges, we’ve pretty much caught up with where we were a couple of decades ago, around 34, 35, you’re back there. Some of this is changes in the methodology and some of this is just active investments on the part of UW-Madison. But in the other three dimensions, we find that we’ve basically declined. Most pronounced is the decline over the last decade or so.

Zac Schultz:
Let’s talk about that timeline because 2010 was when Scott Walker became governor, Republicans took over the Legislature, and they started about a decade-long process of forcing the UW to spend down its reserves and cutting — freezing tuition, cutting spending. Is there correlation and causation lining up in those areas?

Ananth Seshadri:
It’s a bit hard to say. We don’t exactly go into the details of why the rankings fell. Interestingly, one of our follow-up papers is going to ask the question, is the Wisconsin taxpayer a little too stingy when it comes to funding UW-Madison? And we’re right there in terms of the median of our peers. If you look at state appropriations per undergraduate student FTE, we’re not that far off from our median. So I would say there’s not a whole lot of evidence to suggest that that’s the major cause of the decline. I do believe that there are other aspects, both internal and external that we could address in order to better serve both the state of Wisconsin and our students.

Zac Schultz:
And your paper also looked at the research and development money, and UW used to be second in the nation. They’ve dropped to eighth. A lot of that is individual professors who write some of those grants and bring in the research for their particular areas of study. Once again, we’ve seen a lot of, I guess, so-called university superstars get poached by other universities. How much of that is related to pay and the environment and replacing them from within, I guess?

Ananth Seshadri:
Sure. So one of the things we’re not as good at as relative to our peers is our big grants. So an award from the office of vice chancellor for research are very focused on trying to get these multidisciplinary teams in getting $30 and $50-million grants from the federal government. One thing that we’ve got to be better at is to be a little more nimble. To give you an example, in 2020-2021, AI was a big initiative. So are we investing in AI and moving resources to the priority areas of the federal funding agency as fast as our peers. And so something like that would really help with shoring up our R&D funding.

Zac Schultz:
No matter the cause of the decline, your paper looked at the global impact. I want you to explain to people how these rankings do matter for some countries and whether they recommend students come here.

Ananth Seshadri:
Sure, I mean international rankings are very popular. Generically, students all over the world look at these international rankings of world universities. We note in the paper that it actually has bite. For instance, in the U.K. government, Chinese government, give priorities for students who graduate from a top 50 global university. So it’s not just the signaling value associated with the ranking, but it actually has real consequences.

Zac Schultz:
So does that mean we could see fewer foreign students on campus? In the past, that had been a big source of tuition coming in.

Ananth Seshadri:
Right. I think as an institution, we remain an excellent institution. So by no means is the report trying to sound alarmist bells, but I think it’s more of a call to arms to make sure that we allocate resources nimbly and efficiently. And, yes, I do think we would see pressure in terms of international students, excellent international students who want to choose UW-Madison as a destination, especially if we further continue to decline in these global rankings.

Zac Schultz:
In your executive summary, you say UW-Madison will benefit from a renewed commitment to excellence. What does that mean, and without more funding, how does that happen?

Ananth Seshadri:
Funding is a really critical part of the story. So I’ll go back in terms of funding and say that if you ask the question where are we against our peers, it’s not state appropriations where we are very different than our peers. It’s undergraduate in-state tuition. There’s this general trend towards a lot of concern with increasing tuition, but UW-Madison is excellent in ensuring that the students graduate debt-free. So as a source of revenue, that’s kind of where we stand out relative to our peers. In terms of being nimble, in terms of allocating resources, what I had in mind is the fact that over the course of the last few decades, student demand has changed. So now computer science is the most popular major. Priorities of the federal government has changed. In order to be able to both ensure that we cater to those students and cater to the new areas that are essentially being priority areas, then we’ve got to be moving resources much more nimbly than we have in the past.

Zac Schultz:
All right. We’ll leave it there. Ananth Seshadri, thanks for your time today.

Ananth Seshadri:
Happy to be here. Thank you.