UW cranks out thousands of graduates a year into a local job market that can't absorb them all at the salary level they were promised. Should students be told upfront that a Badger diploma may require leaving Madison to cash in?
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Add your commentI'll push back on everyone defending the status quo here: when did it become the STUDENT'S fault for not researching well enough? UW's admissions and marketing is glossy, aspirational, and completely silent on local job absorption rates by major. They take your tuition and let career services handle the fallout with a resume workshop. That's a structural honesty problem and calling it a personal responsibility issue is just letting the institution off the hook.
Born and raised on the east side, watched this play out with basically every friend I grew up with. Either you leave for Chicago or Minneapolis to actually use your degree, or you stay and work at a coffee shop on State Street pretending the "connections" you made at UW are going to pay off any day now. The university sells this dream of staying in Madison forever but the math just doesn't work for most people.
The Wisconsin Idea is about applying education to improve society statewide, not a jobs guarantee lol. It wasn't founded in 1848 either — UW was chartered in 1848 but the Wisconsin Idea as a philosophy came around 1904 under President Van Hise. Please don't confidently spread bad history on a debate forum.
My daughter graduated last spring with a communications degree, summa cum laude, portfolio, internships, the whole thing. Eight months later she's doing part-time social media work for three different small businesses and netting maybe $2,200 a month. She loves Madison too much to leave and I respect that, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. The university ABSOLUTELY should have clearer conversations with students about realistic local outcomes by major. That's not pessimism, that's just honest advising.
Hard disagree. Got my engineering degree from UW in 2019, stayed local, got hired at Epic in Verona literally before graduation. Epic alone hires hundreds of UW grads every year. The problem is people get degrees in fields with no local demand and then blame the city.
Lived in Madison 11 years before finally moving to Denver last fall. Best city I've ever lived in, genuinely. But at 34 I was still splitting a house with roommates on a nonprofit salary that hadn't kept pace with anything. The degree wasn't worthless — it was the assumption that Madison's economy would grow fast enough to meet the ambitions the university spends four years cultivating in you. Spoiler: it hasn't.
ok but can we talk about the rent situation for a second. even if you DO land a decent job here after graduating, a one bedroom near campus is like $1,400+ now. the salary you're pulling at some nonprofit or state agency job does not stretch the way it used to. madison is quietly becoming unaffordable and nobody wants to say it out loud
I moved here from Ohio for grad school in 2021 and honestly the job market surprised me. State government jobs, the UW hospital system, American Family, Trek — there's more here than outsiders assume. That said, if you're chasing finance or entertainment or fashion, yeah, you're leaving. That's just geography, not a UW problem.
anyone telling you a college degree "requires" you to live in a specific city is setting you up for disappointment regardless of which school you attended. this isn't a UW problem this is a you-need-to-be-flexible problem. grown adults should do their own research
Fun fact: UW-Madison was actually founded specifically so students would stay in Wisconsin after graduating. It's called the Wisconsin Idea and it literally dates back to 1848. So this "leave to cash in" framing kind of spits in the face of what the whole institution was built on.
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