Summer Tuition

Resources on the Incentive-Based Budget Model for Summer Session Tuition

Current State

Summer instruction is valuable for several reasons: it allows students to maintain or accelerate their time to degree, provides opportunities for students who would otherwise start in the fall to take courses before the beginning of the academic year, allows opportunities for innovative instructional formats, makes use of space, and generates additional funds.  Historically, summer has been treated as a self-supporting program.  Fees are expected to cover the full costs of instruction and associated indirect costs (such as library access and student services).  Summer revenue has also been used toward academic year instruction and to mitigate impacts of state funding reductions.

Summer is different from the academic year in a two important ways.  First, students have less availability of financial aid programs, though in some years Pell Grant funding has been made available in the summer and the campus typically provides supplemental funding to meet students’ summer sessions aid need.  Additionally, instructors, including some faculty, are hired for summer independent of academic year appointments and receive additional  compensation tied specifically to summer teaching. 

Like aspects of the Undergraduate Tuition Revenue model, the Summer budget model seeks to align resource allocation with teaching effort.  In the case of the Summer budget model, the only metric used to determine allocations to units are Student Credit Hours (SCH) based on pay department.  Students of all levels take, and pay tuition for, summer courses, so graduate and professional SCH are included in the Summer model.

After directing about 30% of summer tuition to return to aid, about $5 million maintains the historical subsidy to academic year funding that evolved out of changes to State support, and about 9% of revenue net of aid is directed to Student Affairs for services provided to students during the summer, the same proportion of funds they receive in the academic year if the Student Service Fee and tuition were combined.  The remainder is split, 80% to academic units and 20% to the central campus.  Units and the central campus use these funds similarly to UGTR funds during the academic year.

Diagram for incentive-based budget model for summer tuition, as described on the webpage

No changes are planned to this component of the Incentive-Based Budget Model. 

For more information, contact the Budget Office.

 

Resources (PDFs):