November 16, 2017

New OPB Brief on Activity Based Budgeting (ABB) Trends

OPB has released a new brief that provides an overview of Activity Based Budgeting (ABB) distribution principles and trends at the UW in Seattle. This brief updates last year’s overview, adding the most recent year’s data. It compares the ABB budgets of Seattle academic units to those of Seattle administrative units over the last seven years (FY12-FY18). The brief also describes a change in the distribution methodology of net tuition operating fee revenue that became effective in FY18.

A few noteworthy trends described in the brief include:

• Every academic unit’s ABB budget has increased since FY12.
• Academic units continue to experience more budget growth than administrative units, both in terms of real dollars and in terms of proportionate growth.
• Of the 34 percent total combined ABB budget growth for Seattle academic and administrative units, 73 percent occurred in academic units, while the remaining 27 percent occurred in administrative units.

The brief also touches on ABB’s future at UW. OPB is working with stakeholders to address emergent issues identified since ABB’s implementation, such as potentially duplicative courses and degrees, the distribution of supplement funds (e.g. permanent base budgets), and summer quarter revenue from programs run by the Continuum College.