Most university SLP and audiology clinics are structured as cost centers. The clinic generates clinical revenue, that revenue flows to central administration, and the department receives a flat budget allocation that has little to do with what the clinic actually produced. Semester after semester.
That's not a surprise. It's by design — or more precisely, by historical accident. The training clinic model was built around educational goals, not financial ones, and the institutional structures that got built around it have mostly stayed in place. But the programs that have figured out a better path didn't do it by arguing louder in budget meetings. They did it by learning which funding mechanisms actually exist and building a case for them.
This post maps 10 of those mechanisms. We've covered each one in depth elsewhere — links to those full posts are included in every section. Think of this as the index.
Federal Grants
1. OSEP Personnel Preparation Grants
This is the most underused large-scale federal funding available to university SLP programs, and it's not close.
OSEP (Office of Special Education Programs) administers grants under IDEA Part D that fund graduate-level training programs preparing clinicians for school-based, early intervention, and high-need disability settings. Awards run five years, with totals ranging from $1M to $3M+ per award cycle — and programs can apply for continuation funding after the initial period.
Hampton University received $1.26M to train 24 SLP scholars for high-poverty schools. University of Nevada Reno received $1.3M focused on rural and frontier SLP workforce development. Fontbonne University has received over $8M in OSEP and related grants across multiple award cycles.
What makes this mechanism especially valuable: the money flows directly to the academic department, not through central administration. That changes the financial picture entirely.
If your program trains students for school-based settings, early intervention, or underserved populations, you're likely more eligible than you think.
→ Full guide to OSEP Personnel Preparation Grants
2. NIDCD Training Grants
About 81% of NIDCD's research budget goes to university-based scientists and clinicians. If your audiology or communication sciences program isn't pursuing NIDCD training grants, that number is worth sitting with.
Most program directors know the T32 — the institutional training grant that funds multi-year doctoral and postdoctoral research programs, with direct cost budgets ranging from $500K to $1.5M+ per year. What most don't know is the full portfolio behind it:
- T35: Short-term research placements for AuD students, with ~$2,400/month in trainee stipends. Vanderbilt and Boys Town have active programs.
- R25: Research education grants for curriculum development and pipeline building — the right starting point before you're ready for a T32.
- K01: Career development awards that give junior faculty protected research time to build toward independent grant funding.
- U01: Cooperative agreements for established programs running clinical trials, with direct costs up to $700K+/year.
These mechanisms form a progression. R25 builds the pipeline. T35 brings AuD students into research. T32 creates the institutional training program. K01 supports junior faculty. U01 funds the trials.
→ Full guide to NIDCD Training Grants for Audiology Programs
Foundation and Philanthropic Funding
3. ASHFoundation Grants
Most SLP faculty know ASHFoundation exists. Far fewer have mapped the full portfolio of what it actually funds.
The full range runs from $4,000 student research awards to $75,000 Clinical Research Grants — and there are mechanisms at every point in between:
- Clinical Research Grant: $50,000–$75,000. Open to investigators at any career stage. Explicitly designed as a bridge toward federal NIH/NIDCD funding.
- Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration Grant: Up to $35,000 per team, up to four awards per cycle. Requires a PhD researcher paired with a practitioner — which is exactly the team structure a university program already has.
- New Century Scholars Research Grant: $5,000 for investigators within five years of their PhD. Right for junior faculty building pilot data.
- New Investigators Research Grant: $10,000 for doctoral candidates. Your PhD students should know this exists before they graduate.
- Student Research Grants in Audiology and Early Childhood Language: Up to $4,000 each.
The strategy that works: treat these as a deliberate sequence toward federal funding, not as isolated opportunities. An ASHFoundation award builds the track record that makes a NIDCD T32 or R25 application more competitive later.
→ Full guide to ASHFoundation Grants for University SLP Programs
4. Scottish Rite RiteCare Partnership
Since the early 1950s, the Scottish Rite's RiteCare program has been funding university speech-language clinics across the country. No competitive portal. No annual deadline to scramble for. Just local lodges building relationships with university programs they believe in.
There are over 180 RiteCare programs currently operating across the country, and the funding reflects genuine long-term relationships: Cal State LA received a five-year pledge of $386,500 from the California Scottish Rite Foundation. Cal State Long Beach restructured and expanded its SLP program through a RiteCare partnership. Georgia Southern's RiteCare Center serves more than 300 community members annually.
RiteCare is specifically oriented toward pediatric communication disorders. Services are provided regardless of the family's ability to pay — and the lodge contribution is what covers those operating costs. That expanded pediatric caseload is also a genuine training asset for student clinicians.
The first step isn't an application. It's an email: ritecare@scottishrite.org. The national office can tell you which lodges in your state are actively funding SLP programs.
→ Full guide to Scottish Rite RiteCare University Speech Clinic Partnerships
Insurance and Billing Revenue
5. Medicare Part B
Most university SLP clinic directors assume Medicare doesn't apply to them. That assumption is wrong in two directions.
First, Medicare Part B does cover outpatient speech-language pathology and audiology services at university training clinics. The supervised training model doesn't disqualify you. Second — and this matters — if your clinic is already treating Medicare-eligible patients and you're not enrolled, you may already have a compliance obligation. Federal regulations require any SLP or audiologist providing covered services to Medicare beneficiaries to enroll and submit claims. Accepting cash instead isn't a workaround. It's a violation.
The supervision requirement is specific: a qualified, ASHA-certified clinician must be physically present in the treatment room for the duration of every Medicare session. The student delivers treatment under the supervisor's direction; the supervisor is the clinician of record. For most university programs, this level of involvement is already standard practice. The documentation just needs to make it explicit.
Enrollment runs through PECOS and takes 60–90 days. Programs at Florida Atlantic, the University of Alabama, and Illinois State have all gone through this process. At 2025 MPFS rates, evaluation codes yield roughly $80–$150 per session depending on service type and location.
Note: Medicare telehealth for SLP and audiology services expired September 30, 2025. Medicare patients need in-person sessions as of October 1, 2025.
→ Full guide to billing Medicare Part B at a University Speech-Language Clinic
6. Medicaid and EPSDT
Federal law is clear: Medicaid covers speech, hearing, and language services under 42 CFR §440.110, and university clinic settings are not excluded. If your program serves low-income families or children, there's a good chance a meaningful portion of your caseload qualifies — and if you're not enrolled, you're delivering those services without reimbursement.
The biggest opportunity is EPSDT — Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment. It's a mandatory Medicaid benefit for every child under 21, and it covers all medically necessary SLP and audiology services with no per-visit caps. For university programs at HBCUs, institutions in urban areas, or clinics partnered with school districts, the Medicaid-eligible population in your current caseload is often higher than expected.
Billing flows through enrolled, licensed supervisors — not students. Each session links to a supervising SLP or audiologist with an active NPI. Some states require direct on-site supervision for Medicaid-reimbursed student-delivered services; others allow general supervision. Your state's provider manual spells this out.
One compliance point: once a patient is enrolled in Medicaid and your clinic is enrolled as a provider, you cannot charge that patient out-of-pocket for covered services — including sliding scale rates. Medicaid billing replaces the sliding scale for those patients.
→ Full guide to Medicaid Enrollment for University SLP and Audiology Clinics
Not sure which program applies to which patients? See Medicare vs. Medicaid for University Speech and Audiology Clinics for a side-by-side breakdown.
Structural Financial Models
These last four aren't grant programs or billing enrollments. They're ways to change how revenue flows inside your institution — so the clinical activity your program already does actually builds departmental capacity.
7. Dedicated Clinical Fee Structures
A lot of university SLP clinics set a fee schedule and then watch that revenue flow somewhere else. The problem usually isn't the rates. It's that there's no structural protection on the revenue side.
The most effective fix: embed a clinical fee directly into your program's published tuition and fee schedule, disclosed at enrollment, and designated by name for clinic operations. Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania has this running for both their SLP and audiology programs — AuD students pay $1,000/semester with 100% going to the Hearing Clinic; SLP students pay $750/semester going to the Speech Clinic. Because it's a disclosed fee tied to program access (not clinical billing revenue), it doesn't flow through the same channels central administration typically controls.
Beyond student fees, the post covers tiered community access rates (Florida Atlantic's three-tier model), income-documented sliding scales, and CEU workshop revenue — which typically doesn't run through clinical billing and may be retainable even in programs with centralized billing models.
→ Full guide to University SLP Clinical Fee Structures
8. Auxiliary Enterprise Designation
University housing keeps its revenue. So does the dental clinic, the vet hospital, and the teaching hotel at schools that have one. The mechanism that makes this possible is auxiliary enterprise designation — and it's more available to SLP and audiology teaching clinics than most program directors know.
An auxiliary enterprise is a unit that furnishes goods or services, charges a fee for them, and is managed as an essentially self-supporting activity. Teaching clinics at peer universities — dental schools, pharmacy schools, psychology training clinics — have made this argument successfully. The SLP clinic has the same basic structure.
The two criteria that typically matter: your clinic must be integral to the educational mission (easy to argue — accreditation requires it), and you need a credible path to self-sufficiency. That doesn't mean you're already breaking even. It means you have a realistic financial model showing when you would.
The proposal goes to the provost or CFO level, not the dean's office. And the frame that works is a structural efficiency argument, not a budget request: you're not asking for more money. You're asking to retain the money your clinic already generates.
→ Full guide to Auxiliary Enterprise Designation for University SLP and Audiology Clinics
9. Budget Autonomy via the RCM Framework
The budget conversation most clinic directors have with administration goes something like: "We need more funding." That framing almost never works. There's a better one.
Responsibility Center Management (RCM) is an institutional budget philosophy where academic units receive credit for the revenue they generate and are charged for the shared services they consume. About 100 universities use it in some form. You don't need your institution to adopt full RCM to benefit from the logic. You just need to make the argument in RCM terms.
"Let us keep what we earn" lands differently than "give us more." The post walks through the data you need before that conversation — 12–24 months of billing records, a per-session cost analysis, and a break-even projection — and the institutional language that gets the proposal heard by the right people.
→ Full guide to making the case for Budget Autonomy at Your University SLP Clinic
10. Specialized Services and School District Contracts
The University of Maryland HESP clinic built a financially self-sustaining model around three revenue streams: a preschool for children with speech and language disorders (stable, recurring enrollment), cochlear implant mapping and audiology services (high-value specialty work priced at market rates), and school district contracts — where the district funds a clinical instructor position at the university in exchange for supervised SLP services.
That last one is worth dwelling on. ASHA's 2024 Schools Survey found that 78.5% of school-based SLPs report that job openings in their districts exceed available candidates. A university program that approaches a neighboring district with a contract proposal isn't asking for a favor. The district has a staffing problem they need solved. You have supervised clinicians who need school-based hours. That's a real mutual interest.
The post also covers how tracking "goodwill discounts" — the documented dollar value of below-market services your clinic provides — turns into a tangible community benefit number you can use in grant applications, budget conversations, and accreditation reports.
→ Full guide to what a financially sustainable University Speech Clinic Business Model looks like
Where to Start
You don't need all ten of these. The programs that have changed their financial picture typically started with one or two that fit where they were at the time.
If your program trains students for school-based or early intervention settings and serves underrepresented populations, OSEP grants are the place to look first. If you have pediatric caseload and aren't enrolled in Medicaid, that's untapped reimbursement for services you're already delivering. If your clinic generates billing revenue that disappears into central administration, the auxiliary enterprise and fee structure conversations are worth starting.
The first step in almost every case is the same: pull your data. Know what your clinic generates, where it goes, and what it costs to operate. You can't make any of these arguments without the numbers — and the numbers are usually already there.
If you want a documentation and reporting platform built for university SLP and audiology programs — one that makes it easy to pull billing data by payer, track caseload outcomes, and build the financial reports these conversations require — schedule a demo with ClinicNote.