The Florida Board of Governors has awarded $20 million in performance bonus funding to the state’s public universities including $2.2 million for Florida Gulf Coast University.
FGCU’s share of the bonus funding is based on the schools performance in several areas, including the percentage of students who find jobs or continue their education in Florida after graduation, the wages earned by graduates in full-time jobs, and the cost of educating each undergraduate student.
“We are one of only two state universities that kept tuition flat this year when compared to last year,” said FGCU President Dr. Wilson Bradshaw.
FGCU scored well on the Board of Governor’s criteria for determining how much each school would receive earning five out of six possible points.
The performance bonus funds don’t come with restrictions and university officials are still working to determine how to use the money.
“One of the challenges that we have is that those funds are not recurring,” said Bradshaw. “So it would be very difficult to see how we could hire a lot of staff with those dollars, but we’re going to bring out best thoughts to the table and listen to our faculty and our staff and our students and then come up with a plan for spending these new dollars.”
With the exception of Florida Polytechnic University, which is not yet open to students, all 11 public universities in the state received bonus funding ranging from $435,000 for New College of Florida in Sarasota to $2.6 million for the University of South Florida in Tampa.
