Legislature approved, adjusted new funding model

Rebeca Piccardo/News Director

The proposed Board of Governors’ Performance Funding Model was approved by the state legislature with more funding than originally requested and some modifications as a result.

Upon its approval, the legislature adjusted the new funding model to total $200 million—twice the amount proposed by the BOG, according to Kenneth Jessell, University senior vide president and chief financial officer.

In the proposed model, the BOG had asked the Florida Legislature for $50 million in new funding and proposed to take $50 million out of the universities’ base budget—which amounts to about 3 percent of each school’s individual budget—to reallocate, based on a 10-metric 50-point system that measures university performance.

In the proposed model, universities earning  26 points or higher out of 50 would have their base funding restored and be eligible for new funding.

However, universities that score 25 points or less would risk losing a portion of their base funding, which would be reallocated for the use of the higher-scoring, thus higher-performing, performing universities.

Data courtesy of the Florida Board of Governors website. Institutions that scored 25 points or less than 50 points did not receive any new funds and lost one percent of their base funds.

The University scored 34 points, restoring its $5,464,558 share and granting it $1,491,676 in additional funding.

With a 0.16 percent net increase in base funds, the University earned $7.2 million in funding  for the 2014-2015 academic year.

The model includes eight measures common to all Florida state universities: employment rate, wages, the cost of degree, graduation rate, grade point average, the number of Pell-grant recipients, the number of bachelor’s degrees in STEM and the number of graduate degrees in STEM.

Two additional measures unique to each university make up the 10-metric system. For FIU, these measures are the percent of bachelor’s degrees without excess hours and the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to minorities.

Now with a $200 million total budget for the model, $100 million will go into new funding, $65 million into base budget reductions and $35 million in redirection of existing Gap Analysis and Performance Funding, according to Jessell.

This means that unlike the proposed model, which would cause the three lowest scoring universities would lose 1 percent of their appropriated base budget, the legislative adjustments will give universities the chance to save their base funding.

“In the Legislative model, the three lowest scoring universities have the opportunity to develop and present a plan for improvement and, if approved by the BOG, regain the funding they lost in the base budget reduction,” said Jessell in an e-mail to Student Media.

-news@fiusm.com