Fearless Sifting

Control of the Assembly is also at stake. There isn’t a whole lot of predictive information available about how close any of the races are, but I did find this interesting answer from about a month ago in a State Journal interview.

What will be your first piece of legislation?

Nass: I will re-introduce my proposal for a 4 percent, 4-year resident tuition and fee cap in the University of Wisconsin System. This proposal passed the Assembly in June 2007 as part of the state budget process. However, Gov. Doyle threatened to veto the provision by request of System administrators and it was kept out of the final version of the budget. The fight to control the cost of public higher education in this state is vital for middle-class families that can’t afford average annual tuition and fee increases of more than 9 percent.

While it’s nice that Steve Nass wants to keep higher education affordable, this would be a bad idea on so many levels. The first one is that the 4% cap would be completely arbitrary and makes no sense in light of inflation that has been at 4.9% over the past year. Secondly, the state legislature shouldn’t be tieing the hands of the UW administration like this. And if they are, there ought to be some kind of accompanying guarentee of minimum increases in state funding that would be needed to continue to subsidize low in state tuition rates. No one in the UW System wants to make tuition unaffordable (see the comments from Biddy Martin in my last post), but tuition increases are likely neccessary to avoid sacrificing the quality of education provided. If Steve Nass is really concerned about keeping tuition affordable, he has the power to do so, through the state budget every other year.