The University of Wisconsin has halted all undergraduate admissions and placed a hiring freeze on faculty and staff positions to deal with budget cuts similar to those at Iowa Regents institutions.

University of Wisconsin System President Katharine Lyall announced the suspension on student admissions Sunday and the hiring freeze Wednesday.

“We just can’t continue to admit more students knowing we don’t have the money or resources to educate them,” Lyall said. “The only way we can even begin to save $125 million in one fiscal year is to freeze all hiring, not fill vacancies and admit no more students. We’re not even sure that will do it either.”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott McCallum originally called for a $50 million cut to help deal with the state’s budget crisis. Wisconsin state legislators announced earlier this week they would cut funding to the 26-campus system by $125 million for the next fiscal year.

University of Wisconsin officials hoped to raise tuition by 10 percent next year, but legislators capped the tuition increase in a single year at 8 percent, which added to the problem, Lyall said.

“We cannot offset as much of the cut with an increase as we had originally hoped to,” Lyall said. “Iowa has done it successfully and I think most of our students would be willing to pay a little more to have the continued access and quality of education.”

The Iowa Board of Regents has discussed suspending admissions and implementing a hiring freeze, but it is still a work in progress, said Board of Regents Executive Director Gregory Nichols.

“It’s not likely right now that either will happen to the entire system for the next fiscal year, but we aren’t at that point in our budget talks just yet to say that it won’t happen,” Nichols said. “At a future occasion we might discuss a similar proposal, but there are still some things that need to be worked out.”

To deal with budget cuts, the ISU College of Family and Consumer Sciences has implemented similar stops to those in place in Wisconsin.

“We are going to be cutting back many programs and have talked about limiting enrollment in many of our majors for next year,” said Carol Meeks, dean of the food and consumer sciences college.

“We haven’t been able to fill some of our vacancies because of the budget cuts, but we do currently have nine searches right now for faculty members. If they placed a hiring freeze on the university, I don’t know what we would do.”

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is facing a similar situation to the food and consumer sciences college, said LAS Dean Peter Rabideau.

“Everyone has seen the recent Board of Regents study about the decline in tenure and tenure-tracked faculty in Iowa,” Rabideau said. “We have certainly thought about halting hiring, but that would send us in a downward spiral. I’m personally very afraid that if we implemented such a program we would find ourselves falling so far behind that it would take years to catch back up.”

He said President Gregory Geoffroy recently discussed enrollment management within the entire university to help with budget de-appropriations, but no decision has been made.

Enrollment management has been a major issue within the College of Business the last few years, said Interim Associate Dean of Finance Gary Koppenhaver.

“There has been discussion, but not a final decision yet, to raise the grade point [average] required to be admitted to the college next fall,” he said. “We have lots of students and, rather than increase class sizes, we would like to raise the bar and limit enrollment that way.”

Vacancies within the college were not filled last fall while they waited for budget cut announcements, but this semester they have interviewed candidates for various positions to be filled in July, Koppenhaver said.

One college that has not considered halting or limiting admission, or implementing a hiring freeze to deal with budget cuts, is the College of Engineering.

“We just don’t see those options as smart ideas that would benefit our program,” said Ted Okiishi, associate dean of the College of Engineering.