In recent years, MATLAB licensing for campus has been handled by a MATLAB Funding Consortium, whereby the departments that are chief users of MATLAB jointly pay the licensing cost, and all campus members benefit by having access to MATLAB. As part of the Consortium representing the largest group of users, the College of Engineering has generally been responsible for about half of the campus MATLAB licensing cost, with the EECS Department responsible for half of the College cost.

Individual MATLAB licenses may be obtained as described on the Campus Software Central website. This is the recommended choice for using MATLAB on laptops or personally-owned devices.

For shared group or lab computers, where Individual licensing is not practical, MATLAB can still be used with campus license servers.