Alumni and Industry Support

Although UW-Madison is a state-supported institution, only 21.0% (2004) of our budget comes from the state. Tuition is another important source of revenue. However, UW-Madison has historically emphasized "access" (i.e. affordability) as an important attribute of our campus - our tuition is second lowest in the Big Ten. Another source of revenue, contributions from alumni and industry, is also very important for the University and our department; in many cases, contributions provide the additional margin that is required to maintain the excellence of our programs.

Most of the funds that the Department receives are targeted for student scholarships. As everyone knows, going to college is expensive. Fortunately, it is easy for our alumni and recruiters to get excited about the prospect of educating our students - our students are the leaders of tomorrow. Thus, we are fortunate to have many scholarship opportunities for our students.=

The other, less visible, mission of our department is to conduct research that benefits society by contributing to its knowledge base. In fact, the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin is "to create, integrate, transfer and apply knowledge." Like education, research is an activity that requires support of alums and corporate sponsors. We are particularly proud of the research accomplishments of our department and invite you to visit the Department Research portion of our site where we summarize these efforts.

We also apply a small portion of untargeted gift funds to department administrative expensive. These cover things such as photocopying professional examination materials, bringing guest speakers and the like.

Primarily under the research heading, we are fortunate to have four professorships within the department. Other funds come in primarily along programmatic lines. Thus, we invite you to visit the Actuarial Science and the Risk Management and Insurance support sites for summaries of these donations.

We hope that you will be excited about the possibility of supporting our efforts. Please contact us to find out how you can help. Further, you can visit the UW-Foundation site to make a contribution to our programs on-line.