Board of Regents committee forms task force to normalize Excel and CTE fees

The Board of Regents Budget and Finance Committee agreed during its meeting to form a task force of community- and technical-college leaders and finance officers to normalize reporting and review Excel and career-technical education (CTE) fees across the system.

Committee members said the immediate goal is to make the fee data comparable across institutions so the committee and the TEA can more reliably evaluate fee requests and explain variances to legislators. “As this data is collected year in and year out, it comes in in a way that makes it fairly hard to analyze across the system,” said Charmin, a staff presenter, on the need for more consistent inputs so the committee can “make good decisions.”

Members debated whether the task force’s goal should emphasize minimizing fee burdens on students or ensuring instructional quality and efficiency. One member proposed revised language: “the goal is to review and confirm that all actual Excel and CTE fees are appropriate to ensure quality and efficiency.” Several members said both aims—limiting undue student burden while protecting program quality—should guide the group’s work.

The committee settled on a compact task-force composition: one president and one finance officer to represent the community colleges and one president and one finance officer to represent the technical colleges, plus committee members and staff. Seth and Jim (community/technical college representatives on the call) were asked to consult their peer groups and identify which president and CFO will serve as representatives. Staff agreed to circulate prior guidance documents, webinars, and FAQs to the colleges and to ask institutions to provide qualitative explanations for any materially divergent fees.

Members discussed timing and milestones: the task force will convene a kickoff meeting before the TEA meeting and is expected to report back to the TEA by May; institutions typically submit updated fee data in October, which the group will use once the normalization process and guidance are established. Committee members emphasized focusing staff effort on material variances rather than line-by-line audits: the process should identify outliers, request narrative explanations from the relevant school, and follow up only where the variance remains unexplained.

The discussion surfaced several practical concerns the task force will address, including cases where foundation or third-party funding covers fees (so fees do not always fall directly on students), clarifying which fees should be uniform across institutions (for example, a standardized licensure fee), and preserving instructional quality while seeking efficiencies. The committee scheduled a task-force kickoff at 09:00 on the 27th to precede the TEA meeting and asked Seth and Jim to confirm representatives and for staff to communicate the draft timeline and materials to colleges.

The committee did not take a formal vote to adopt final goal language; members agreed the draft language and final deliverables should be further refined by the task force and at the next committee meeting.