Frederica Freyberg:
As for the pinch on college students, the UW System President Kevin Riley proposed today that UW-Madison students pay $618 more intuition this fall, a 5.5 percent increase. That's on top of a $250 surcharge to cover Chancellor Biddy Martin's Madison Initiative, which will provide grants to make the Madison campus affordable for families with incomes below $80,000. Over the summer, many students will be trying hard to earn at least some of their tuition. Reporter Art Hackett wondered about the feasibility of earning your way through college. He discovered it didn't used to be this difficult.

Man:
Want to get it up on your 140 or so, so you are doing good now.

Art Hackett:
Dante Leone of Madison is a semester away from wrapping up his degree in rehabilitation psychology. Over the summer, he's working three jobs. Two at sports facilities, the third umpiring baseball games. He estimates this covers about 10 percent of his tuition.

Dante Leone:
Maybe 10 percent, 20 percent at the most. I rely a lot on federal money, loans and stuff like that.

Art Hackett:
Quinn Ducey will be taking a break from his studies in the fall. He wrapped up his first year at UW-Eau Claire without taking out loans. But it came at a cost of a work load he could not maintain.

Quinn Ducey:
I would go to work and then I would go to sleep, done with work at 4:00 in the morning at the bar close and driving back home, I would not get a lot of time before class to get sleep and then made studying harder.   

Art Hackett:
He's working as a waiter at a restaurant near the Madison campus hoping to be able to better afford college a year from now.

Art Hackett:
A "Here and now" analysis of minimum wage data and UW-Madison tuition numbers dating over 50 years, shows working your way through college wasn't always this difficult. In 1955, if a student could work for seven weeks at minimum wage, about half of a summer, they could cover their tuition for an entire year. The ratio between wages and tuition held steady for nearly 30 years. As recently as 1984, it only took ten weeks of full-time work, about the number of weeks in a summer, to cover tuition. But then, things came apart. Today it takes nearly 30 weeks, over half a year. Noel Radomski is a researcher with the Wisconsin center for the advancement of post-secondary education.

Noel Radomski:
What happened was, the substitution effect.

Art Hackett:
A substitution for the revenue lost in the 1984 recession.

Noel Radomski:
The legislature stopped funding higher education because of the recession at the time, so the substitutions that took place was cut funding, higher education in Wisconsin because of the other public priorities and put it on the backs of the students and the families because of increased tuition.

Art Hackett:
This is not just a Wisconsin phenomenon. An analysis of data for a shorter time span for national four-year public universities shows a nearly identical trend line. Radomski, an historian by training, says the cutbacks born of the recession were only the beginning of the problems.

Noel Radomski:
There is an arms race, especially with the research universities. Why? Because all of a sudden you have the tuition going up substantially.

Art Hackett:
Students became consumers.

Noel Radomski:
And when you have tuition going up substantially, they start to have a bigger voice. But a response at many universities, not just the Madison campus, but throughout the nation, was to start offering, and obviously charging, for services beyond the core academics.

Art Hackett:
It started a cycle which was kicked into a higher gear with the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton pushed to expand the student loan program.

Susan Fischer:
We do know that 1992 we know students’ debt loads increased dramatically, the door opened in the guaranteed student loan program.

Art Hackett:
Susan Fischer, director of student financial aid at Madison. She says the changes allowed students like Dante Leone to borrow more money than before.

Susan Fischer:
Families and students without need often, had access to the loans. And within 18 months our loan volume doubled, doubled. And so some of that went to fill need and a lot went to fill desire as opposed to need.

Noel Radomski:
It was argued and approved under the guise of access. We need more kids, especially low income, students of color, under-represented kids. But what happened is, fast forward to 2009. UW-Madison, the average loan debt when they graduate is $22,000. $22,000. That didn't exist in 1985. So again, the intent was good. We need to offer financial opportunities so that there is access. But, when you add all these variables, federal level, state level, recession, student tuition, you get what we have today.

Art Hackett:
Analysts differ as to what degree easier access to loans triggered more spending by universities. What today's students probably agree is working your way through school is nearly impossible.

Dante Leone:
It's going to take me 4-and-a-half years, and that's with taking a summer course last year, and six credits this summer. So that doesn't really leave you the option of working full-time either.

Art Hackett:
The era when 10 weeks of summer working at minimum wage would pay a year's tuition is an era long since passed.

Quinn Ducey:
Definitely could not do that now. Tuition for me was $5,000 a semester. About, maybe a   little more. I don't think I could pull that in working a minimum wage job over a summer. I don't think there's a possible way to do it. You could have to work two jobs, three.

Frederica Freyberg:
That was Art Hackett reporting. Today UW System also released projections for tuition increases at other UW System schools. UW-Milwaukee tuition will increase $359. The other system campuses will see tuition go up $280.