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What's the Matter with Wisconsin?

By drorzel on January 4, 2007.

Inside Higher Ed reports on an impressively bad idea from the upper midwest:

"If we can't lure them here, let's tether them here," said Mark O'Connell, executive director of the Wisconsin Counties Association, a lobbying organization, and a member of the Commission on Enhancing the Mission of the Wisconsin Colleges, a group created to advise the network of 13 two-year colleges in the state.The commission, appointed by the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges in August, submitted a report late last month calling for an investment in new scholarships pegged to residency requirements post-graduation. "If we can't lure people to our state, smart, young people, let's give them education and then require them to stay here a certain number of years," O'Connell said.

I have a 9am lab today (this article, like most of my daytime posts, comes to you via the "schedule posts" feature), so I was lamenting the fact that I wouldn't have time to rant about what a silly idea this is. Happily, though, the Dean Dad did it for me.

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the details may be a little off, but the idea doesn't seem that spectacularly bad to me. the uw is an excellent system and i don't see any problem with enticing (not trapping) its graduates to stay.

perhaps a better way of looking at it is this. let's say a student takes out a loan to cover their higher education, as is typical. then for every year spent working in wisconsin, the state pays off a percentage of your loan. is that really so silly?

Hmm... as a Wisconsinite it would be interesting to know if this guy was actually a graduate from the Wisconsin system. I haven't really seen any publicity about this and I think it will never fly - it imposes immediate costs on the state government for no obvious gain, and that would be a no-no here currently.

Where I could see some variation of this would be at the smaller UW campuses: Superior or Platteville, for example, as an incentive to have people go there rather than jumping at the Madison and Milwaukee UW campuses, just to level out admissions.