Turns out Walker has been cooking the University's books for a while now ....
http://bloggingblue.com/2015/02/the-uw-system-funding-cuts-a-spreadsheet/
One of the more interesting things I found was that in 2010-11 all Federal Direct Loans started to be passed through the UW System budget. This resulted in an additional ~$700 million/yr being added to the System budget, giving the appearance of a large increase in both funding and spending, when it was really just a change in how this money was counted. (So, while the 2014-15 total UW System budget is ~$6.1B, it must be adjusted to ~$5.4B if we’re going to make meaningful comparisons with the Doyle years.) In my spreadsheet I back these Direct Loan dollars out of the budget so it is more of an apples-to-apples comparison with earlier years.
It’s also interesting to note that debt service has gone from a little under 3% of the total system budget under Doyle to over 4.5% now under Governor Fiscally Responsible.
