Summer Quarter Report

Previous

Next

VIII. Administrative and Budgetary Issues

Present and Phase I Budget Characteristics
Phase II - Expanded Regular Summer Quarter

The present arrangement of administration of the Summer Quarter by the Vice Provost for Educational Outreach has served the University well, and should continue during Phase I. The organization of the curriculum should remain primarily with the schools/colleges/departments, in coordination with the Vice Provost. Curricular directions should remain primarily determined by student demand, as is now the case.

The transition to the full state-supported Summer Quarter, or Phase II, will be accompanied by the complete transfer of administrative control for this fourth quarter to the various schools and colleges. This is an appropriate administrative change because the Summer Quarter, as the fourth full quarter of the academic year, should have the same administration as the rest of the year.

The salaries for teaching faculty and teaching assistants will increase with the implementation of Phase I. In addition, the support by administration and staff of summer instruction likewise will require additional funding, as will the appropriate operations support. The level of administrative and operations support should be decided by mutual agreement of the Vice Provost with the deans. These increased costs will significantly reduce the amount of revenue that has been historically deposited into the University Designated Operating Fund.

Present and Phase I Budget Characteristics

Following is a breakdown of the total cost of education, both direct and indirect, for the regular academic year as reported in the Higher Education Coordinating Board's Educational Cost Study for 1994 (Table 1):

Table 3: HECB Educational Cost Study

Total tuition revenue received from summer, 1995 was $10.3 million. Of this amount, $6.2 million was used by the Summer Quarter administration to pay direct instruction and minimal support costs for the Summer Quarter administration. The remaining $4.1 million was transferred to the DOF budget where it was co-mingled with other DOF revenue sources to support academic and administrative support units across campus.

On a per student basis, the support costs for students during the summer is very low compared to the regular academic year. With $10.3 million in tuition revenues, the 1995 summer produced 9,133 FTEs. This is a mix of graduate and undergraduate students. Total summer funding amounts to $1,126 per FTE for the quarter, the equivalent of $3,378/FTE for a three-quarter academic year. This compares to the funding factors* below used in the 1997-99 budget (Table 2):

Table 4: Costs for summer vs. regular year students

Due to its relatively small size, summer is able to operate on the principle of marginal costs and does not attempt to capture full, average cost per student through its tuition.

At least two pertinent questions in assessing the prospect of Summer Quarter expansion should be posed as part of the planning exercise. First, how many students can be added to summer on this relatively inexpensive marginal cost basis? Second, at what point does expansion in summer require the same level of full, average funding currently requested and funded by the Legislature in the regular academic year?

The following data provide detail for the 1996 Summer Quarter (Table 3) and our best estimates, using these data as the basis, of the costs that would be incurred in implementing Phase I (Table 4).

Table 5: Financial Profile: Current Model (1996 Actual)

Table 6: Financial Profile: Phase I*

It is clear that the amount of refund to the University's DOF will be significantly reduced by the increases in salaries, operations, and other costs of implementing Phase I. It is the view of the committee, however, that this gradual reconfiguration of the Summer Quarter in Phase I is a necessary step if there is to be a possibility of eventually transforming the Summer Quarter, in Phase II, into a fully equivalent quarter with high rates of student and faculty participation.

Phase II - Expanded Regular Summer Quarter

To illustrate these costs, current average costs per student applied to a 25,000 FTE increase in summer enrollment to approach the regular academic year quarterly enrollment level would result in the following cost:

Table 7: Estimated Costs for 25,000 FTE in Phase II Summer Quarter

These data provide only a rough indicator of the amount of funding required to increase summer enrollment to the full academic year enrollment level. Approximately 35% of this amount would come from tuition with the remainder from the State General Fund as during the traditional academic year.

In the capital facilities, there is currently some excess regular, generic classroom space available with which to expand summer enrollments at no extra cost. Data indicate that on average about 35% of available classrooms are utilized for credit instruction in summer. This does not count any non-credit instructional use. Not all this unused classroom space is available for increasing summer enrollments, however, since much of it is preempted by other uses, including maintenance activities. Some rescheduling of these activities may be possible, but further analysis is needed to determine just how much actual capacity exists in summer. Nevertheless, if regular classrooms become a limiting factor in the traditional academic year, use of unused summer, or afternoon and evening, classroom capacity would be less costly than constructing new classrooms.

There will be, however, increased capital costs to the state to provide needed office space and specialized instructional and research space for increases in numbers of faculty, staff and students. In order for summer enrollments to reach regular year proportions, presumably the mix of coursework and faculty by discipline would closely approximate the current academic year characteristics. To the extent that summer enrollment increases could not be accommodated by existing faculty, new faculty offices, specialized instructional facilities and research space would have to be provided.

The success of the Summer Quarter should be evaluated annually during Phase I, and for the first few years of operation of Phase II. These evaluations should measure the success of the initiatives for increasing the participation in the summer, and a full report should be made to the provost, deans and department chairs. It is anticipated that some of the initiatives proposed here may not succeed in increasing participation in summer, and that only with careful evaluation and policy decisions driven by this information will appropriate modifications be made.

Summer Quarter Report Previous Next

Provost's Summer Quarter Committee 1997
provost@u.washington.edu
May 1997