OFFICE OF THE PROVOST
FY 2017 Annual Academic Budget Narrative Outline
School/College/Unit: _______________________
For the fiscal 2017 budget planning process, we would like to implement a standard budget
narrative outline that will both address specific strategic questions as well as give us a broadbased, all funds window into your priorities. Funding sources we expect to see discussed include:
University-provided base budget, gifts, endowments, overhead from externally sponsored grants,
discretionary funds, net proceeds from entrepreneurial programs, and graduate/professional
tuition sharing. This outline will define the specific areas that should be addressed. It is
envisioned that your overall proposal will not exceed ten pages in total.
I. All funds summary: achievement of goals during fiscal 2015.
Please provide an all-funds summary of how your school/college has used its resources to make
progress on, or achieve its goals during fiscal 2015. This should be based on the goals you
outlined in prior budget meetings and should indicate how you utilized all sources of both new
and existing funding. Please specifically address both your most significant achievements and
your biggest struggles during fiscal 2015 with regard to your use of your funds to achieve
strategic goals.
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II. Specific Strategic Questions
In addition, please detail how you chose to allocate resources in fiscal 2015 toward three
strategic areas:
A) Recruitment and retention of outstanding and diverse faculty. How did you allocate
resources in fiscal 2015 toward this area and what are some specific examples of successes
and challenges?
B) Your progress toward creating new, and enhancing existing, revenue streams associated
with graduate and professional programs. Building on your graduate strategic planning
meetings with Associate Provost Tim Barbari, what have your greatest successes and challenges
been around these programs?
C) Focusing resources to improve the quality and stature of select academic programs.
What are the one, two, or three program(s) within your school or college that are of the highest
quality and how have you allocated resources to increase the quality of this/these program(s)?
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III. Fiscal 2017 budget narrative.
Please identify your top strategic priorities for fiscal 2017 and detail at a high level what
support is necessary to achieve each of these goals. For each initiative or goal it is expected that
you will identify not only what new incremental funding (if any) will be necessary, but also that
you will detail how existing funding or projected funding (gift, endowment, graduate /
professional tuition sharing, etc.) can either be allocated or redirected toward these top
school/college priorities. For a sense of scale, we do not envision that an initiative requiring less
than $50,000 will be highlighted as a priority for larger schools/colleges. For smaller
school/colleges, the expectation is that no initiative requiring less than $10,000 will be
highlighted.
Within the narrative for each initiative please also detail any new positions requested. If you are
proposing strategic changes or new initiatives around online, entrepreneurial, or summer
programs, these should be summarized at a high-level with one overall initiative for each of
these categories. Typical annual variances and adjustments around these programs should not
be summarized here.
Finally, for each individual initiative please complete a high-level summary table that separates
recurring and one-time funding. Then please also complete an overall summary table for your
total request. A few examples are below.
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