Oregon Budget Model

Report on Graduate Funding Issues

The Graduate Funding Taskforce, created to take a first look at graduate funding issues as related to the OBM, has completed its work and filed a final report with the provost.  Included in the report of the task force are the following changes to policies and structures within the OBM.

Summer Session:  Under the OBM, summer term graduate tuition revenues should be distributed to the Schools and Colleges strictly by student credit hour, as opposed to the current method of distribution, distribution strictly by major.  This change will go into affect with summer session 2011. This policy trumps the two subsequent policy changes.

Joint Degree programs and formal graduate double-majors:  Beginning fall term 2011, the tuition for graduate students who are formally enrolled in concurrent graduate degree programs or joint degree programs will be the average of the tuition in the two separate programs.  Graduate tuition revenue associated with such students will be allocated to the two programs at 50% of their normal tuition rate.  These policies go into affect fall term 2011.   At this time the joint MBA/JD program is the only excpetion to these policies. 

Graduate Certificate Programs:  Under the OBM, any graduate revenue associated with a student who is formally enrolled in a certificate program will be split, with 70% of the tuition going to the school or college of the student's major and 30% going to the school or college of the certificate program.  This policy goes into affect fall term 2011.  This policy is slated for review in four years.

I would like to thank the members of the taskforce for their time, considerable effort and collegiality.  Any questions about these policy changes should be addressed to the Vice Provost.

Final Budget Model startup values set.

We have posted four substantive changes to the startup values of the Oregon Budget Model.   The budgetary consequences of the changes can be seen in revised documents on the Public Reports page.  All of this is essentially just housekeeping.  In brief, the four changes are:

1.  Taxation of Designated Ops:  In order to avoid double-taxation of designated operations, we will henceforth be rebating the overhead on designated operations paid by academic units, at the time that OBM taxes are calculated.

2.  GTF medical benefits:  This was explained in a blog post of 9/15/10.

3.  Other GTF expenses:  In addition to academic year GTF medical expenditures, there are substantial GTF employment expenses associated with summer session that were previously covered centrally.  Under the OBM these expenses must be covered by the hiring unit and must be captured in the hold-harmless calculation that seeds the OBM.

4.  Honors College Differential Tuition:  We fixed a small mistake in the methodology of calculating differential tuition revenues in the Honors College.

Enrollment Numbers

As of late Friday afternoon, enrollment numbers look very good.  The number of students enrolled on Friday was up about 7.6%  over the same date last year, and total Student Credit Hour enrollment was similarly up about 7.1% over the same time last year.  Based on the past few years, we expect both the head count and the SCH count to increase substantially over the next couple of weeks. 

Changes to GTF Medical Benefit Charges – New Rates

Beginning fall term, policies on collections for GTF medical benefits will change substantially.  In order to equitably budget for a medical benefit program with multiple benefit levels and in order to assure that increases in medical costs are borne by the appropriate responsibility unit, we have created a blended rate for what we must charge for GTF medical benefits.  This rate will affect all units that hire GTF’s.  The new blended rate will be $1210 per GTF per quarter during the academic year.  A substantial budget adjustment will be made in the schools and colleges to offset the majority of this change as it relates to academic GTFs.  A memo to that effect will be going out soon and we will post the associated budget changes on this web site as soon as they are finalized.