The story of the bloody mess

Part of my job is to administer a federal grant from the faculty perspective. Because I'm so good at my job, the administration sometimes lets me do their stuff too. My boss (the faculty member who is director of the program) doesn't want details of problems. He either wants to know when it's so bad I need him to yell at people or when it is solved.

This grant is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant funded to our university (I'll call us U of Us) with our partner university (I'll call them U of X). The grant is worth millions (we have most, but our partner receives 1 mil for their 5 students per year)

Part of the students responsibility is to participate in an exchange at the other university for a semester.So, we have 6 of our students at the other school (#6-12 who have arrived there) To be considered full time, students must be registered for 9 credits to be full time. These can either be research credits or class credits. The students don't want to take a full course load at University X, so we had arranged for them to take 6 credits at Uof X and 3 research credits at Uof Us. This would require them to take 3 research credits at $500 a credit hour and 6 exchange credits at $0 per credit hour.

Uof X would charge us in-state-tuition for the remaining 6 credits of course work taken at their university. U of X has research credits, but it's too hard for the students to take them their as they are non-degree seeking students at the exchange university since they will receive their degree from U of Us.Well, it seems that U of Us can't charge credits with a dollar amount and credits with no dollar value at the same time it would either have to be the 9 credits at $500 or 9 credits at $0 but we can't mix.

So, I had to spend all week finding a way to either make the system here do something logical that it didn't want to do OR find a class at the other university that would give the students what they needed so ours only had to charge 9 credits of $0 exchange credits.Finally it worked out. We found a class they could use.

THEN, late friday afternoon I got an email that U of X didn't want to charge our students in-state tuition because we've sent 12 students to them and they have only have registered 5 students here - so they feel there is an imbalance (never mind our tuition is twice theirs). So, they want to revisit the agreement AND discuss if they should continue with this million dollar grant now or in the future. This message was from the Assistant to the Chancellor so this is not a mid-management administrator expressing this.

I suspect the indirect return they receive to the institution outweighs the lost tuition for students who never would have been there.This may make a few decision in the future a little easier.

*shakes head at short sightedness*

So, not only have I beat my head, but caused other in our billing department to beat theirs.
Ultimately, it was fixed, but it did cause a bloody mess.

(Danielle - is this layout better? I've wanted to try something different, this just pushed me in the right direction!)