UW Oshkosh Provost Ed Martini announced that the university is no longer operating in the red, and Chancellor Manohar Singh previewed the upcoming school year during UWO’s convocation address Aug. 28 inside Reeve Memorial Union.
“Two years ago, we stood up on this stage and we told you that we were facing a structural deficit of $18.5 million and had a lot of work to do on the cost side of the equation,” Martini said. “Last year, we said we’ve made a lot of progress, but we still got a heavy lift in front of us with an $8.6 million deficit left to close. And I’m pleased again to share with you today that the budget that we submitted to the Universities of Wisconsin (UWs) this year and that we’re currently operating under has no structural deficit whatsoever.”
Martini said that UWO is expected to save $3.86 million during the 2025 fiscal year, and $3.76 million during the 2026 fiscal year. The biggest savings came from the university’s academic restructuring ($1.5 million), the Voluntary Retirement Incentive Option Program for faculty ($1.1 million) and a 25% reduction in overload expenditures ($1.42 million).
UWO also reported during convocation that they are projecting a 3% to 5% drop in enrollment, but that new graduate student numbers are up 13% and transfer students are up 5%. The projections are based on the UWs’ 10-day enrollment census, which showed the university had 13,127 students in 2024.
During his address to the university, Singh announced that UWO will be looking to make more changes as the school year progresses, including new degree programs relating to artificial intelligence, and the addition of new athletic teams such as women’s flag football.
Singh said that his goal for the university is to innovate and to be ahead of the curve.
“We want to be relevant,” Singh said. “We want to be serving the community that we were supposed to be serving, our research, our teaching, our enrollment strategies will be all focused on it, including every single person in the state of Wisconsin, as we have a system of institutions. We’ll be collaborating with them so that no one stays uncovered by the reach of accessible, affordable education. And that’s a promise.”
Singh said that one of the ways to be ahead of the curve is to give students a degree faster, while keeping the graduation requirement to 120 credits.
“Giving college credits to your high school students is another way of doing that,” Singh said. “We have 5,600-plus dual enrollment students. [We need to be] giving them the pathways we can do that innovation in that sense, where we pick them up when they are ready, and bring them to the horizon of their success when they are ready, without compromising the quality. Nothing diluted will work in favor of Wisconsin or in favor of this most powerful, most beautiful nation on this planet I’ve been around.”
Martini said that the university is in a good position for the next few years, especially because of the new state budget that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed in July.
“We need to continue to be disciplined on position management, good decisions and good headway around procurement, and we’re finally making some progress on the sale of some of our land and parcels off campus that will set us up for success as well,” he said. “… over $30 million is going to campuses like ours that have lost enrollment in helping us to ease the pain of that, and over $22 million is going to campuses based on a credit hour completion metric.”
Singh said that he wants to honor all of the sacrifices that had to be made during the budget cuts over the past two years, and said that as chancellor, he’s not focusing on reducing course offerings.
“We are re-engineering, reimagining, re-defining their role as those producing leaders, critical thinkers, scientists, artists, not just someone who can code,” Singh said. “There will be 170 million more jobs created because of AI. We are here to serve those 100 and 70 million new job seekers that make sense … We are bound by our promise to the state of Wisconsin. We are bound by our promise to humanity that we will make the world a better place with every single stroke of our keyboard and every single writing up with our pen, that’s who we are.”
