Oshkosh Chancellor Andrew Leavitt announced the university’s Fox Cities campus will close in June 2025 due to low enrollment — the sixth two-year campus in two years to either end in-person instruction or shut completely.
Leavitt confirmed the news Thursday after Outagamie County Exec Tom Nelson blasted him and UW President Jay Rothman for the decision this morning.
“We reach this decision after spending a year analyzing UWO Fox Cities enrollment, the region’s and state’s changing demographics, student participation rates, the regional higher-education landscape, potential for new and unique academic offerings and economic trends in the competitive Fox Valley marketplace,” Leavitt said. “In the end, we made a difficult but responsible decision.”
The decision comes as enrollment has declined by nearly 67% over the past 10 years, with a five-year average decline of nearly 19%. The campus had just 454 full-time equivalent students in the fall.
And with the number of high school graduates in the state expected to go down 13% over the next 10 years, a UW-Oshkosh analysis projected the possibility of fewer than 100 students at the Fox Cities campus by 2032.
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Wisconsin abortion data.
Live births:
- In 2022, there were 60,032 births, 2,054 of which were multiples (for example, twins, triplets, etc.).
- The Wisconsin state birth rate continued to slowly decline over the past 20 years, dropping from 12.7 live births per 1,000 people in 2003 to 10.2 in 2022. This decline has been slower than the downward U.S. trend, narrowing the gap between the state and the national birth rate.