TCAC
July 2000 Report Index
Index to Appendices
Funding of what will become the carry-forward budgetary component of new student enrollments is directly proportional to graduate and undergraduate student FTE's. Student FTE's, in turn, are defined in terms of student credit hours delivered: 15 student credit hours delivered equals one undergraduate student FTE and 10 student credit hours delivered equals one graduate student FTE. Thus, at the most basic level, it can be said that funding of new student enrollments is directly proportional to the additional student credit hours to be offered.
When the actual number of students (head count) is very close to the number of student FTE's, i.e., when there are few part-time students, the implications of the accounting system mentioned above offer no special problem with respect to funding or even resources measured in terms of faculty and staff time. However, when the research universities' average cost metric is applied and there are significantly more actual students than student FTE's, then a more complex analysis of the workload required for effectiveness must be employed.
Specifically, in this latter case, a part of the workload still is directly related to student FTE's (i.e., credit hours) but another important part is not related to FTE's but rather to head count. Thus, there remains a direct correspondence in the classroom between head count and student FTE's served. In a five-credit class for undergraduates, each actual individual on the class roster accounts for 1/3 of a student FTE, whether he/she is a full-time or part-time student. As a first approximation, then, the effort by the professor delivering the course increases equivalently whether one thinks in terms of adding one or two or three more individuals or in terms of delivering 5 or 10 or 15 more student credit hours.
However, when one considers the other activities necessary to serve students, the demand on resources (both human and financial) clearly correlates more nearly with actual student numbers (head count) than with student FTE's. In fact, in these activities, listed below, the workload is grossly underestimated via the student FTE metric (i.e., the student credit hour metric). By way of illustrating the point, let us consider UW Bothell's average annual number of student FTE's (844) served compared to the student head count (1170) for the 1998-1999 academic year. Faculty and staff advised 1170 actual students while "officially being credited with serving 844 student FTE's."1 Admission and matriculation processes were executed for 1170 individuals not 844. The billing and collecting of tuition and fees was done for 1170 persons not 844. Grade reports were prepared and mailed to 1170 people not 844. E-mail accounts were made available to 1170 individuals not 844. Instructions and strategies for effectively using UWB's library and information resources were provided for 1170 individuals not 844. Finally, the faculty and staff at UW Bothell had to be prepared to write recommendation letters for many more individuals than indicated by the number of FTE's.
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1 The difference in the advising load, when head count and student FTE numbers differ significantly, is particularly dramatic in graduate programs and other programs featuring independent projects. The reason is that consultations / tutorials (e.g., about professional development) are labor intensive pieces of the education process for each individual student, whether their enrollment status is full-time or part-time.
June 16, 1999
TCAC
July 2000 Report Index
Index to Appendices
