Strategic Budgeting

In Fall 2024, President Keller charged student, faculty, and staff representatives to develop recommendations for a new budgeting model for UNT to advance our university's mission and values as a leading public research university while also offering flexibility for innovation and growth. This new budgeting model will be designed to align university resources with strategic priorities, increase financial transparency, and provide a solid foundation for our future.

Three committees have been established to support this work and to consider feedback from a broad cross-section of campus stakeholders.  Read about these committees here.

The guiding principles for this work will lead the committees to recommend elements for a new budgeting model that will make it easier for the UNT community to understand the budget process, improve operational effectiveness and efficiency, and plan for the future.

Why create a new budget model?

In recent years, UNT has grown in enrollment and sponsored research. The need for the kinds of opportunities and contributions UNT can provide continue to expand rapidly across our region, our state, and beyond. The approach to budgeting that has been used historically at UNT has been a combination of incremental and centralized budgeting.

Incremental budgeting means budgets are based on the previous year’s funding with only new revenue being allocated each year. This also means that budget cuts, when needed, are typically made as a percentage of the total budget and often implemented across the board. This approach is easy to implement, but can be difficult to determine how expenditures relate to costs, revenues, and institutional priorities since the primary focus is maintaining a stable, steady budget.

Centralized budgeting creates a pool of revenue that allows university leaders to make decisions about distributions of funds. When used in combination with incremental budgeting, this model usually requires relatively few decisions. However, this approach may lead to confusion about how resource allocation decisions are made.

Universities across the country have implemented many different variations on these and other budgeting models. Our commitment to UNT is to develop and implement a model that advances our university's mission, values, and strategic priorities.

These efforts will set us on a new trajectory toward more effective, efficient, and responsive budgeting that support and strengthen UNT for an even greater future.