UW Oshkosh to shut Fox Cities campus
Confronted with steep monetary challenges and declining enrollment, the College of Wisconsin at Oshkosh has introduced it can shut its Fox Cities campus, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
The closure shall be efficient June 30 of subsequent 12 months.
The Fox Cities website, positioned about 20 miles from UW Oshkosh, is the sixth two-year campus within the Universities of Wisconsin system to be tapped for closure in recent times, WPR reported.
“We attain this choice after spending a 12 months analyzing UWO Fox Cities enrollment, the area’s and state’s altering demographics, scholar participation charges, the regional higher-education panorama, potential for brand new and distinctive educational choices and financial tendencies within the aggressive Fox Valley market. In the long run, we made a tough however accountable choice,” UW Oshkosh chancellor Andrew Leavitt wrote in a assertion asserting the closure.
Leavitt pointed to a 67 % enrollment decline on the campus prior to now decade and stated enrollment projections confirmed Fox Cities might fall beneath 100 by 2032 given latest tendencies. UW system enrollment information places the headcount at Fox Cities at 562 in fall 2023, down from 1,629 college students in fall 2018, the very best enrollment level within the final 10 years.
Regardless of the rationale for the closure, officers in Outagamie County, the place the Fox Cities campus is positioned, are seething. Outagamie County Govt Tom Nelson blasted Leavitt and UW System President Jay Rothman.
“Had Leavitt and Rothman learn All I Actually Have to Know I Realized in Kindergarten, they’d have understood the significance of enjoying truthful, taking accountability, saying sorry when errors have been made and placing issues again as they have been discovered,” Nelson wrote in a assertion on Thursday. “As a substitute, Leavitt and Rothman let down the scholars and households of UW Fox and betrayed their belief—and now it is going to be as much as the remainder of us to wash up their mess. Disgrace on you.”
