Full Time Equivalent (FTE) Pricing Models
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) for schools, community colleges, colleges and universities refers to the size of the student body.
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) for businesses, corporations, nonprofit organizations and government agencies refers to staff size.
One method of pricing services to libraries is the FTE pricing model. This model can be used to determine a library's cost for subscriptions or other services. Pricing is announced as being "per FTE." This allows a vendor to announce pricing in very simple terms that are easy to calculate for each library.
For consortia such as BCR, sometimes the pricing is not determined until all of the various libraries' orders have been placed with BCR. At that time, the total FTEs enrolled in the consortia purchase are used to set the FTE price based on some predetermined volume pricing table. This then becomes the final FTE price for each enrolled member of the consortia. When pricing is determined in this way, BCR staff negotiates a maximum or ceiling price with the vendor. The ceiling price is then guaranteed to libraries when they are asked to commit to ordering. The plan is to lower the ceiling price by enrolling a large number of FTEs.
K-12 Schools and Higher Education
FTE is a common standard for measuring enrollment in K-12 and higher education. Statistics are often reported to higher levels of government and accrediting organizations in terms of student FTEs. State departments of education and accrediting agencies have developed their own definitions of how many student hours/credit hours/days represent an FTE student. Part-time students are counted as fractional FTEs, then summed to provide a total enrollment figure. In other words two half-time students add up to a single FTE. Basically the FTE is equivalent to the total enrollment of a school. You should use the accepted local formula for calculating your FTE student enrollment. Frequently your school administration already has this number calculated.
Use your best guess about your FTEs during the subscription year. If in doubt, start with your previous fall enrollment and make adjustments for anticipated growth or attrition.
Adjusted FTE
To apply the FTE measurement to multiple types of libraries, often requires "tweaking." A database publisher may analyze the utility of its product and determine that it has little relevance to children in the lower elementary grades, and that it would be unfair to include their FTE in calculating the price of the database for a K-12 school. A vendor might also decide that its product has less value to higher education and discount the cost by using a multiplier such as 75 percent to reduce the cost to higher education. These tweaks are determined by the vendor or by negotiations between BCR and the vendor. Hence they become vendor specific. You cannot reasonably assume that if Vendor "A" discounts grades K-3, then vendor "B" will do the same.
Publishers may also acknowledge that residential campuses can make much more use of their databases than nonresidential campuses (community colleges). This is also true of public libraries.
Nonschool/Nonacademic Libraries
The FTE model is also used for nonschool/nonacademic libraries.
Public libraries are often required to use the size of the population served multiplied by some vendor determined tweak factor. Generally the population served is based on the population of the geographic area that provides tax money to support the library. The number of circulation transactions, people who walk in the door or library cards in circulation is not considered.
To accommodate these situations, some form of a discount is employed. This is usually done by using a fraction of the institution's actual FTE count. These fractional counts are often referred to as "Adjusted FTEs."
Employers often use FTE to refer to their total number of employees. Or, for Web-based products, an employer might be asked to count only FTEs that have desktop access to the Internet.
Many of BCR's Web enrollment forms will automatically calculate your subscription costs. You can use this feature without submitting your order. Just type in your FTEs in the appropriate table then click anywhere on the background of the form, or if there is a Click to Calculate button, click on that.
