While undergraduate enrollment in most University of Wisconsin System schools trends downward, there has been a dramatic increase in students choosing the state’s technical colleges since the pandemic.
Historically tied to population and economic shifts across the state, the 16 schools in the Wisconsin Technical College System are benefiting from a re-evaluation of the cost and value of four-year colleges and the turn away from two-year colleges.
The technical college system has also become a state leader in dual enrollment, allowing high school students to earn higher education credits for classes taken at a technical college or a university.
Enrollment across the technical college system for the 2024-25 school year is 293,904 — an 18 percent increase since 2020-21. The number of full-time equivalent students is 64,451, according to WTCS data, 11 percent higher than 2020-21.
In comparison, enrollment has gone the other way, if only slightly, in the University of Wisconsin System. In the fall of 2024, 138,703 students were enrolled in undergraduate programs, down by about half of one percent since the fall of 2020. Of those enrolled in the 2024-25 school year, 111,744 were full-time, down 2 percent since 2020-21.
Some traditional universities in the UW System, including UW-Madison, are growing their enrollments in recent years, but they are exceptions. The main campuses of UW-Milwaukee, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Parkside, UW-Platteville, UW-River Falls, UW-Superior and UW-Stout had fewer full-time undergraduates enrolled in 2024-25 than they did in 2020-21, as did many of their satellite campuses.
Part of the boom at the technical schools comes from increasing numbers of high school students in dual enrollment programs. A record 78,703 high school students were earning dual enrollment credits at the end of last year, 63,115 or 80.2 percent of them through technical colleges, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum study published this summer.
State senators Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, and André Jacque, R-New Franken, introduced a bill late last month to streamline, simplify and encourage students and families to take advantage of dual enrollment.
Technical colleges are seeing the results of focusing on the needs of students and the businesses that rely on trained workers in their regions and adjusting their curricula to meet those needs, said Katy Pettersen, chief spokeswoman for the WTCS.
Among those adjustments are providing classes that signal to students that technical college is a route to a well-paid job but also a legitimate starting place for a four-year degree, Pettersen said.
“Jobs, and education for jobs, is still going to be what we do, and we are training for the future, for programmers for AI,” Pettersen said. “We’re not your grandfather’s vo-tech.”
An indicator of the rebound for technical colleges is in the credentials — chiefly associate, applied associate or technical degrees or short-term diplomas — earned by students, according to WTCS data.
Students earned 29,751 credentials in the most recent school year, up 5 percent from the year before and up 11.3 percent since the COVID year 2020-21. The 28,325 credentials earned in 2023-24 was 6 percent higher than the year before, according to the data.
The difference in the cost of education between technical colleges and the UW System is more important than ever. The annual tuition fee across the WTCS system is $4,585.50. Annual tuition fees for the UW System this school year vary from a low of $6,006 for an in-state student at UW-Stevens Point’s Marshfield campus to $12,166 for an in-state student at UW-Madison.
Making it easier for students to transfer between the UW and WTCS and making universal such early college credit programs as dual enrollment were two recommendations of last year’s legislative Study Committee on the Future of the University of Wisconsin System.
While that committee’s purview was the UW System, committee chair Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, said students and taxpayers are asking more about what technical colleges are providing for education.
“Right now, they (the public) are seeing more value in our technical colleges than in the UW System,” Nedweski told the Badger Institute. “The public wants to see a return on investment when it comes to higher education. They want to see our institutions of higher learning serving and building Wisconsin’s workforce.”
The technical college system in Wisconsin has evolved out of necessity to serve employers and to help keep a trained workforce in communities, many of them rural and low-income, Pettersen told the Badger Institute.
WTCS schools, however, also offer humanities courses with credits that will transfer to a UW System school, although the selection of courses varies by school.
WTCS schools, acting independently, can create and get approval for a new class or program in less than six months. That kind of tinkering, tailored to the needs of the local economy, goes on constantly, Pettersen said.
Examples are the Health Career Academy and the Construction Trades Academy through Mid-State Technical College, based in Marshfield. One of its four campuses, in Adams, serves one of the poorest and least educated counties in Wisconsin.
Both academies are grounded in dual enrollment. In one semester, an Adams-Friendship High School student can earn six college credits and earn a certificate in healthcare foundations. A student anywhere in the orbit of Mid-State can earn a technical diploma with 12 credits in the construction trades over two years while still in high school.
Those credits can be applied to additional education and training through the technical college. Jackie Esselman, dean of recruitment and admissions at Mid-State, credits dual enrollment for the success of both academies and a resulting boost in enrollment, the second largest percentage jump this year in the WTCS system.
Aover 2,800 of the 12,440 students on the school’s four campuses earned nearly 12,800 credits through dual enrollment. And because those classes don’t have to be duplicated, the school estimates the overall cost savings to school districts and Mid-State at a little more than $2 million a year, Esselman told the Badger Institute.
The added presence of Mid-State in high schools has, in turn, generated interest in Mid-State as an educational option, she said.
“I love dual credit,” Esselman said. “I wish it would have been available when I was in high school. I probably changed majors six or seven times before I found something I really wanted to do.”
The importance of technical colleges such as Mid-State will almost certainly grow with the decline of two-year colleges, which are part of UW System, particularly in the more remote parts of the state.
As the Badger Institute previously reported (here, here and here) enrollment at two-year UW campuses is steeply down to a few thousand students statewide as the schools vie unsuccessfully for many of the same prospective students as technical colleges or branches that are no harder to travel to.
Over the past seven years, five two-year UW colleges have closed and a sixth now offers only online courses.
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
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