A Message from the Dean: The Time is Now

There are moments when a school can make a major leap forward in terms of quality, scale, and national visibility.  We believe that time has arrived for the Wisconsin School of Business.

 The Wisconsin Naming Gift is the catalyst that can enable us to reach a new level of excellence in our faculty and program quality, school and university reputation, and impact on society through our teaching and research. 

The foundation of excellence for our programs resides within our faculty. To succeed at the highest level, we must augment the size of our faculty and build expertise in areas of strategic importance.  Faculty members who are excellent in both research and teaching command a premium in the market.  Private support is essential if we are to keep pace with the competitive national market for top business faculty.   

We will direct naming gift resources toward programs and people that will drive excellence in areas central to our strategy—especially our new career specialization-based full-time MBA and our flagship undergraduate program.  At the end of it all, this is about adding more world-class people so that we can serve more students and turn out the next generation of leaders and expand the great reputation this campus has for producing leaders   

A New Partnership for Unrestricted Support
 
The Wisconsin Naming Gift is innovative and unusual in that nearly all of the funds are unrestricted in use.  The Wisconsin Naming Partners have made this unrestricted investment because— on careful inspection—they understood that in today’s world, private support is needed to help fund the core of our operations and they believe in our strategic direction.

Our traditional funding sources have been state tax money and a campus wide tuition pool to fund the base salaries of faculty and staff at the school.  A new partnership is needed because the state tax money and tuition pool available to the university have not kept pace with the growth in real costs of business education. 

The Wisconsin economy is no longer in a position to enable to State to subsidize a research university to the extent it has in the past.  Manufacturing and agriculture do not enjoy the economic strength that they did 40 years ago.  But the returns to education from those who receive it have grown substantially during that same time. These facts dictate the need to rebalance the funding mix of the business school and probably the entire university.

Rather than wait and hope for state support to rebound, we have made a conscious choice to build a new partnership.  The new partnership relies on earning the resources to support the school with revenue from programs for working professionals and financial support from students and alumni.  Our part-time MBA degree program enrollments have grown by 35% this past year.  This spring our students overwhelmingly endorsed and the Board of Regents approved the first undergraduate tuition differential on the UW-Madison campus. Simultaneously, 99% of the graduating Wisconsin MBA class made a gift to the school at graduation. These are the kinds of things you see happening at private schools: new revenue-generating programs, and students and alumni choosing to maintain the quality of their institution with their own resources.

Growing the Partnership: The Power of Many

While the new partnership may have been born of necessity, I believe in the end it will make us a better school—more entrepreneurial, more nimble, more accountable to the things that matter most— the impact of our ideas and our graduates on the world.    

As our funding model continues to shift away from tax revenue and more toward tuition, program revenue and private support, we need to create a culture where more alumni support the school through their time, talent, and financial resources. Our base of more than 36,000 alumni worldwide is one of our greatest potential assets.  To realize the potential, we must engage our alumni as effectively as the best private schools and increase the percentage of our alumni who donate each year to the range of top schools we aim to emulate—Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of Texas.

The 13 members of the Wisconsin Naming Partnership have joined together to make a gift like no other.  But even they cannot tackle this challenge alone.  For the Wisconsin Naming Gift to truly be a catalyst for a new level of excellence, our alumni, students, and others who care about the future of the Wisconsin School of Business will all need to play an important role. For that reason, as part of the Wisconsin Naming Gift, we are launching a campaign to better engage all of our alumni and friends.

The Wisconsin Naming Gift represents the first step on an exciting new path for the Wisconsin School of Business.

On Wisconsin

Dean Mike Knetter
Wisconsin School of Business