100 Years of Tuition: What a Century of College Costs Reveal
By Michael Lambert
Education as a Social Good
There is a hidden narrative buried in the ledger that tracks tuition dollars students have paid over the years to receive a higher education. It’s not the history that gets told often, but it offers an important window into the institution that is told in dollars and numbers rather than pictures and words. Telling the story captured there is tricky—what is the real value of a dollar over time?
The past 100 years of history contains major world events such as World War II and The Great Depression—wartime sacrifices, mergers and expansions, and a decade-long tuition freeze that made headlines. The tension between access and affordability continues to shape debates on the current state of higher education, and the associated costs that students largely bear.
For the first three decades covered by the record that our Geode staff gathered, in-state students paid nothing to attend the Wisconsin State Normal School. The social compact behind that number was based on the idea that the state believed it owed its residents an education, and the value of that education was intrinsically connected to a larger social good.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that students paid nothing at all. A registration deposit of $10 existed (briefly reduced to $5 in the depression-era of the late 1920s), and incoming freshmen in the 1930s faced an additional $11 in assorted fees. Scale that figure through the lens of inflation, and $11 in 1930 equates to roughly $212 in 2026. Tuition, itself, however, was free for Wisconsin residents for nearly 30 years during this time period.
Out-of-state students faced additional fees, which is still common practice today. From 1926 through the early 1940s, non-residents paid a flat fee of $50 per year—a fee that was essentially unchanged for nearly two decades. Surprisingly, during the lean years of World War II (1944-1945) non-resident tuition was nearly cut in half, dropping to just $25.
The Geode, itself, was a student-run newspaper during this time that connected the current student body with graduates and their alma mater. It went from a monthly publication in the 1920s to a bi-monthly in the 1930s, finally appearing only five times per year by the mid-1960s. Students during this time period attended what was a practical and lean institution training engineers and teachers for a state that needed their presence in the workforce.
WSCI Tech, Tuition, and Credit Hours
By the mid-1950s, a shift occurs in the record—residents of the state of Wisconsin had to pay to receive a college education. By today’s standards, the tuition cost—$10 per year—seems a paltry sum. Large or small, it marked the end of an entirely free public education in the state of Wisconsin.
This shift aligned also with changes to the nature of the education that students received. Rather than a two-or-three-year program, students were now classified by credit hours. Graduating from the mining or civil engineering programs required a minimum of 145-146 credit hours with a grade point average of 2.1 or higher to earn honors during this time.
In 1962, the institutions merged and formed a new identity—Wisconsin State College and Institute of Technology. This merger also parallels a new reality in terms of tuition fees: $214 per year for residents, and $404 for non-residents. The era of free public education in the state had definitively ended.
UW-Platteville Emerges as the Affordable Option
The following decade saw tuition climb steadily, but not dramatically. By 1967–68, in-state students enrolled paid $238 annually. Compared to other in-state colleges like UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, which each charged $301, UW-Platteville remained the more affordable option. This distinction still defines the institution today.
By 1971, W-Platteville emerged. Tuition during the 1970s and 1980s accelerated. Oil shocks, stagflation, and the fiscal pressures of those decades hit university budgets hard, and students—not surprisingly—absorbed much of the pain of those changes in terms of cost.
From $292 in 1969, resident tuition at UW-Platteville climbed: $320, $349, $400, $445, $468, and $524 and so on, upward and onward. By 1979, the in-state bill had reached a new all-time high of $677, more than doubling in a single decade. The minimum student wage listed in the catalog during this time was $2.65 per hour, which means that a student working roughly 20 hours a week for 30 weeks could cover their tuition. That math, however, would not survive the next decade.
The 1980s brought no relief for the working student. Annual increases to tuition costs steadily rose between 8-12 percent. By 1986, in-state tuition costs had risen to $1,202—a number that would have seemed unimaginable to the students who paid almost nothing just thirty years earlier.
A footnote from the 1993-1994 catalog lists that federal student loans carried an 11-percent uncapped interest rate. Students financing their education in this era were walking into a metaphorical headwind that, unlike the tuition freeze to come, showed no signs of slowing.
Tuition Freeze Brings Temporary Relief
Then came the early 2000s, and a dramatic acceleration of tuition costs in the context of state budget cuts and surges in demand. The largest single-year jump in the modern record came in 2003-2004: 16.7%. In four short years, in-state tuition costs nearly doubled, leaping from $2,594 to $4,000. UW-Platteville remained the less expensive option, still, during this time when compared to other flagship state institutions, but the gap was narrowing—then came the freeze.
In 2013, facing political pressure over the affordability crisis and rising student debt, the Wisconsin Legislature and Governor Scott Walker implemented a tuition freeze for in-state students across the University of Wisconsin System. It extended for the next decade, lasting until 2023—nine consecutive years without a resident tuition increase.
For UW-Platteville, this meant that in-state tuition rates were locked at $6,298 per year from 2012 through 2022-2023. The freeze brought with it some complications—it didn’t affect fees, out-of-state tuition, housing, meal plans, or other costs. Still, for in-state students, the sticker price was the same year after year. The freeze ended in the 2023-2024 academic year.
The Access Institution Legacy
Access to higher education in the state of Wisconsin tells a complicated story of our shared history. What was once considered a public good has shifted to a model that increasingly puts pressure on students to bear the costs associated with advancing their education. During the years when the state reduced funding, students saw the most rapid increases in their cost, while the freeze years stand out against a backdrop of nearly uninterrupted increases going back to the 1950s.
One bedrock value remains throughout the long history that the tuition ledger tells: UW-Platteville has consistently been the affordable choice within what is now called the Universities of Wisconsin.