Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Funding Formula topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Committee reviews 25-session funding formula changes; pharmacy weight reduced, equalization and "hold harmless" explained
Summary
System office staff briefed the committee on changes made in the most recent legislative session to the higher-education funding formula, including adjusted credit weighting, an equalization step that raised base rates to the highest in each group, a 4% base-rate increase, and the House’s adjustment reducing the pharmacy weight to 14 and applying hold-harmless after weighting changes.
Chairman Sorvaugh convened the committee and asked members to treat the session’s presentations as part of an ongoing bill-writing process; he said he and Alex will begin drafting bill language after the next meeting and urged members to “pay attention because what's said today could be in there.”
Alex (system office presenter) gave the committee a step-by-step review of the higher-education funding formula, describing how completed student credit hours are weighted by program cluster and then adjusted by a credit-completion factor. He said the initial calculation for the 25 legislative session suggested an increase of “over $60,000,000” compared with the prior biennium but noted the 23–25 biennium base figures did not include approximately $17.5 million of targeted equity and employer-retirement allocations that had been outside the formula, which understates the apparent change.
Alex reviewed key technical changes enacted in the 25 session: the Senate advanced several reweightings (for example, moving some law enforcement and wind-energy credits into a CTE weighting and proposing a major increase for pharmacy professional credits). The House later moderated those revisions: the pharmacy professional weight was set at 14 in the final House language (down from the Senate proposal’s 25), and the House applied the hold-harmless provision after any weighting changes so institutions were protected from some reductions triggered by reweighting.
The presenter also described an equalization step used in the conference calculation: instead of averaging base rates across peer groups, the final calculation equalized each group to the highest calculated base rate (for example, bringing UND and the medical school up to NDSU’s $76.31 per credit in the slides shown). Alex said that equalizing to the highest rate, combined with a 4% base-rate increase applied system-wide, produced a systemwide funding effect (he cited an equalization impact of about $5.6 million and the 4% increase as roughly $27 million in aggregate in his slide notes).
Committee members pressed for more detail on the origin and validation of weightings. Senator Sickler and others asked how the program- and discipline-specific weights were set; Alex traced them to a 2013 legislative task force that attempted to cost-inform weights and smooth implementation to avoid large funding swings. Members urged a fresh cost study or a formal audit of how institutions code course prefixes into federal CIP ("SIP/CIP") classifications and whether current weights still reflect real costs, noting that periodic revalidation would improve transparency.
What happens next: Chairman Sorvaugh reiterated the committee’s timeline and said staff will circulate draft bill language at least 10 days before the next meeting. The committee requested supplemental information, including cost-study details and a clearer reconciliation of how targeted equity and employer-retirement pools were incorporated into the final base rates.
Minutes: The committee also formally approved the minutes from the prior meeting by voice vote earlier in the day.
Ending: The committee flagged follow-ups: (1) provide line-by-line reconciliation showing how targeted equity and retirement allocations were rolled into base rates; (2) supply the system office’s underlying cost studies and any available audit trails for how CIP/SIP codes were assigned to courses; and (3) estimate fiscal impacts of alternative reweighting or equalization approaches for next-session consideration.
