The Death of Rural Branch Campuses Leaves Students Behind as Wisconsin Higher Education Retrenches

Last May, just weeks before the final semester drew to a close, students, staff, and faculty at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville Baraboo Sauk County received the devastating news that their school was shutting down permanently. Students scrambled to arrange emergency transfers to other colleges across the state, while employees began trying to line up replacement jobs elsewhere within the broader University of Wisconsin system.

By the end of the month, “Boo U,” as it was affectionately known by generations of locals, had ceased to exist. For nearly 60 years, the institution had stood as an educational anchor in south-central Wisconsin.

The closure of the Baraboo campus was far from an isolated incident. Over the preceding three years, the University of Wisconsin system had permanently shuttered eight of its 13 two-year branch campuses. For decades, these institutions had focused heavily on the liberal arts, providing an accessible and affordable on-ramp to higher education, particularly for rural and first-generation college students who might otherwise never have stepped foot on a university campus.

To mark the final days of Boo U, instructors and students organized a commemorative celebration to pay tribute to the impact the college had made on the region. Among the attendees were members of the very first graduating class, individuals who had received their associate degrees in the 1970s, just two years after the campus first opened its doors to the public.

“It was really a memorial,” says Karen DeSanto, a first-term Wisconsin state legislator who represents the Baraboo area. “The students talked about how this place shaped and changed lives in this community. We don’t have that any more.”

Across the United States, the pace of college closures has accelerated significantly in recent years. According to an extensive analysis published by The Hechinger Report, institutions of higher education are now closing at a rate equivalent to nearly one every three weeks. Yet, even within this broader national trend of institutional turmoil, the wholesale dismantling of Wisconsin’s two-year public colleges remains an unusual outlier. While other colleges closing or facing imminent risk of closure across the country are overwhelmingly private institutions, Wisconsin’s disappearing campuses are part of a public state university network.

University of Wisconsin officials have consistently cited steep, continuous declines in enrollment to justify the closure of these branch campuses. While the broader UW system has seen overall enrollment drop by more than 10 percent since 2010, the downward spiral has been exceptionally acute at the two-year regional schools. In its final year of operation, Boo U enrolled a mere 100 students, a staggering decline from more than 500 students just a decade prior. Plunging student populations meant tuition revenue could no longer keep pace with mounting facility, staff, and infrastructural overhead.

Yet, a shrinking pool of college-age students tells only part of the story. Years of severe budget cuts, which began under former Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2015, combined with a sustained series of strict tuition freezes, have left the University of Wisconsin system ranked among the worst-funded public higher education networks in the nation.

Compounding these fiscal pressures, the UW Board of Regents approved a sweeping restructuring plan in 2017 that officially merged the two-year community-focused colleges with the state’s larger four-year research and regional institutions. This merger inadvertently triggered a competitive scramble for students that pitted the vulnerable two-year schools directly against much larger, better-resourced four-year campuses, some of which subsequently lowered their own admissions requirements to aggressively recruit incoming students.

“At that point the writing was really on the wall,” says Dan Kallgren, who spent his entire professional career teaching history at UW-Marinette, situated just outside Green Bay.

The Marinette campus ended in-person instruction in 2024, limping along for an additional year by offering strictly remote classes. Kallgren ended up teaching the final formal course offered by the school: a Western Civilization survey class broadcast via video link to stranded students scattered across Manitowoc and Sheboygan. “I was the last faculty member on campus,” Kallgren recalls.

System officials maintain that even with the shuttering of these rural outposts, Wisconsin students still have access to a wide array of educational opportunities, including 13 four-year universities spread across the state and a robust network of 16 technical colleges.

However, educators like Kallgren argue that this bureaucratic argument fundamentally misses the point, failing to acknowledge the unique, low-stakes role that liberal arts transfer schools like Marinette have historically played in allowing rural students to safely test the waters of higher education.

“Think about the rural kid screwing up his courage and coming here, then getting turned on to engineering or history,” Kallgren says. “That avenue is now closed.”

Education Deserts

Despite the popular cultural narrative of young adults packing their bags to venture far away for college, statistical reality paints a very different picture. The vast majority of college students enroll at a campus located within 20 miles of their childhood homes. That finding is underscored by extensive research conducted by scholar Nicholas Hillman, who formerly directed a research lab at UW-Madison and now serves as an education professor at Indiana University. Hillman’s research demonstrates a direct correlation between geographic proximity to a college and higher rates of postsecondary educational attainment.

The inverse, however, is equally true. As the physical distance between a student’s home and the nearest college grows, the statistical probability of that student enrolling plummets. Hillman refers to geographic regions left with sparse higher education infrastructure as “education deserts,” warning that Wisconsin’s current trajectory represents the higher education equivalent of “desertification.”

“They’ve hollowed out the two-year schools and the liberal arts transfer mission and now they’re sealing the coffin,” Hillman says. “The question is, if you shut one door, have you opened another?”

That doors are closing permanently for Wisconsin’s rural students is increasingly supported by empirical data. Previous research tracking college access trends in rural communities indicates that the number of rural students enrolling in the UW system has declined at a rate significantly higher than the overall decrease in university attendance. While this trend has multiple contributing causes—including a rising political backlash against higher education in the state’s conservative rural regions—the systematic closure of branch campuses is expected to accelerate the decline.

The gradual disappearance of accessible college options in states like Wisconsin reflects a broader national crisis affecting institutions that traditionally serve low-income and working-class rural students.

“People don’t realize the contrast between schools where programs are being cut and [UW-]Madison where the world is your oyster,” says Douglas Haynes, a professor of English at UW-Oshkosh and the author of the book “Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond.” “There are going to be increasing numbers of rural students who just don’t go to college any more.”

A recent policy study found that Wisconsin suffers from the second-highest rate of “brain drain” in the country, as young, educated professionals migrate out of state shortly after earning their degrees. Haynes argues that diminishing local college access creates an insidious upstream form of brain drain, depriving young rural Wisconsinites of foundational opportunities before their careers even begin. “When we limit college access we’re also limiting the kind of impact these students might have had in their own communities,” Haynes notes.

The Wisconsin Idea

Alex Stevens grew up in Stevenson, Michigan, a small town located on the state’s Upper Peninsula. Unlike many of his high school peers, Stevens always aspired to attend college, but practical hurdles stood in his path. With a disabled mother, both geographic distance and tuition costs presented massive obstacles.

“I was raised by my grandparents, and I knew that caring for my mother was going to become my responsibility,” Stevens says. He ultimately chose the closest available college option, located 25 miles down the road across the state line in Wisconsin: UW-Marinette. “It just made sense to go there.”

Stevens thrived within the intimate environment of the small campus and its small class sizes. His favorite courses involved sweeping, interdisciplinary examinations of United States history taught collaboratively by professors specializing in history, music, and film.

After completing two years of foundational coursework and incurring virtually zero student debt, Stevens successfully transferred to UW-Green Bay to complete his bachelor’s degree in history. Today, he works as a history and social studies teacher at a Catholic high school in Marinette.

“I was rural, poor, and smart and UWM gave me a remarkable opportunity,” Stevens reflects.

Today, however, Stevens’ personal trajectory has become increasingly difficult to replicate. The challenge is not merely that the Marinette campus no longer exists, but that Wisconsin higher education has steadily moved away from the liberal arts emphasis that once formed the core mission of its two-year transfer institutions.

In 2023, Jay Rothman, who served as president of the University of Wisconsin system before stepping down earlier this year, sparked intense controversy by recommending that system schools pivot decisively away from liberal arts programs and toward career-specific, vocational training, arguing the shift was necessary “particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students.”

An investigative project conducted by student journalists at UW-Madison revealed that out of 82 academic programs eliminated across the UW system in recent years, the vast majority were concentrated in the humanities and social sciences.

“There is an increasingly narrow focus on vocational education,” says Alyssa Ratledge, a researcher specializing in rural higher education issues at MDRC, a nonprofit research organization. She contends that the closure of branch campuses and the systematic elimination of traditional majors reflect a fundamental philosophical shift in how states view the overarching purpose of higher education.

“It’s all about getting a job with a positive return-on-investment,” Ratledge says. “But students also go to college to try things out and discover who they are.”

As these regional branch campuses disappear from the map, the expansive, democratic vision of higher education known as the Wisconsin Idea—a Progressive-era philosophy asserting that university education should improve the lives of citizens well beyond the formal classroom—is also in retreat. In Baraboo, local residents are left debating what future use can possibly be found for a collection of empty, quiet campus buildings.

In Marinette, the local theater arts program remains the lone surviving vestige of campus life, kept alive through a precarious partnership with UW-Green Bay, private philanthropic donations, and event ticket sales. Lauryn Albaugh oversees the remaining programming and remains fiercely hopeful that community and children’s theater will continue to inspire local youth, just as it inspired her when she was growing up in the area.

Cast in a local production of “Willy Wonka Jr.” at the age of seven, Albaugh never looked back.

“I really attribute my love for the arts to this theater program,” she says. “That it’s thriving feels very encouraging.”

Even so, Albaugh is today one of only two remaining employees tied to the former UW-Marinette campus, working alongside a lone maintenance worker who drops by once a week to inspect the mothballed facilities.