UNC BOG Forms Funding Model Task Force

The UNC Board of Governors has distributed funding with the same formula for over 20 years. Until now.

In light of the BOG’s five-year strategic plan “Higher Expectations” for access, student success, affordability and efficacy, the board is working on a new plan for fund distribution too.

“This is a great time to go back now that we have that strategic plan in place, connect it with the way we provide the dollars to do that,” said Scott Lampe, chair of the newly-established UNC Funding Model Task Force. “And that’s our plan—we don’t have a new plan yet, just so we’re clear.”

The task force will study the current formula and research the ways in which it can be improved.

Lampe said the funding model is important because it determines how to take the $2 billion support from taxpayers and distribute it to all campuses. But that support needs to change as the universities do.

“The goal of the task force is to create a new funding model that matches the strategic plan and takes into account some of the changes in the world from the last 25 years,” he said.

The way the funding model works today, is that it accounts for each student and the number of credit hours that student is taking, and then weighs funding based on the degree that student is working toward.

Lampe said universities with lab-based research and STEM programs are currently receiving the most money because of the cost of the necessary educational equipment.

But he said the real issues lie with some grandfathered-in costs that were already there. The task force will start from scratch with the funding model as a whole.

“What we have today for the incremental students and the additional students will be at least a portion, I think, of what we do going forward,” Lampe said. “But we’ve got to tie that in with all the strategic plans we have across the whole university system.”

According to a press release from the BOG, the task force will take place over the course of a year, with its first meeting set for June. In that meeting, task force members will discuss the timeline and work plan and examine strengths and weaknesses of the existing funding formula.