Academic Year vs. Fiscal Year

Faxian Yang:

What are the definitions of academic year and fiscal year at your institutions?

Three Different Ways of Counting Academic Year (Based on the respondents)

From Summer to Spring:

(Commenter: Meihua Yang, Michael Tamada, Eva Chen, Hongmei Zhu, Lan Hao, Chunju Chen, Shu-Ling Chen, Nan Hu)

Summer is the beginning of the academic year. It ends with the spring semester.

When degrees are calculated, we use summer as the leader, then fall and spring as the trailer. When new freshmen are counted, we use summer as the beginning. New freshmen who enrolled in the summer are counted together with the new freshmen started in the following fall semester.

For purposes of figuring out when someone graduated, we count the summer as the beginning of the next academic year. It's worth noting however that for purposes of calculating graduation rates, the IPEDS GRS survey says that those summer graduates count with the grads from the preceding academic year (assuming that they first entered in the fall) -- because that give a "6-year grad" a full 6 calendar years to graduate. So that is another example of how "academic year" can be a fuzzy or slippery concept.

There is another factor that needs to be considered - where you count those graduates who graduate in summer. Normally the Registrar's office would like to count them as the previous AY graduate cohort - to satisfy the graduation rate goal. It is true that those students who graduate in summer have only one or two courses to meet the requirements for graduation. So my former school starts AY from the fall semester. Those freshmen who actually start in summer in some head start programs specially designed for needy students as retention improvement intervention are counted in the new AY.

From Fall to Summer:

(Commenter Yang Zhang, Xiangping Kong, Timothy Chow, Bai Kang, Meihua Zhai)

There should be no question that fall semester is the beginning of an academic year. Academic year is used more often by academic affairs, in counting enrollment and workloads and sometimes, summer is not counted, especially for programs that don't offer summer courses. When to use what is usually based on the types of reports. Regarding academic year, most schools start from fall, trailing summer, in FTE counts. With summer early starting contributing to fall cohort's counts, that rule was very recent. FTE-wise, most school STILL trailing summer.

Academic year begins first day of classes in fall and closes after final grades due back to registrar's office. Summer is an additional and optional term.

Fall and Spring:

(Commenter: Chunju Chen, Ava Lee-Pang)

Sometimes academic year only include the fall and the spring semesters.

At my college, the faculty negotiated a 175 instructional days in the academic year which consists of fall and spring semesters only (defied calendar, such as 8/23--12/22 & 1/13--5/22, not including holidays). Summer is not counting as academic year, but it is counting as Fiscal Year (7/1 to 6/30), but if the faculty didn't fulfill the assignment during academic year, can make up the assignment using summer term.

But "academic year" can be a fuzzy concept which varies from school to school. Because our school has only a minimal summer program, with enrollments and teaching loads which we generally do not count at all (except for the IPEDS "credit hour activity" and "unduplicated headcount" questions), for most uses on our campus, the "academic year" only includes spring and fall, and does not include the summer at all.

Two Different Methods of Counting Fiscal Year (Based on the respondents)

July 1 to June 30:

(Commenter: Xiangping Kong, Timothy Chow, Yang Zhang, Shu-Ling Chen, Michael Tamada, Hongmei Zhu)

Whereas our fiscal year for budgeting and financial reporting purposes, it is set for July 1 through June 30.

September 1 to August 31:

(Commenter: Bai Kang) Our fiscal year starts on September 1 and ends on August 31 each year.