Study On Applying The Activity-based Costing To Calculate The Educational Cost Of The Schools For Higher Education Of China

Education cost is the important information that is commonly concerned by university administrators, investors, government departments, and student's family and so on. It is the important reference for governments to decide standard of study fees and to allocate money to schools. Also, it is the important reference for residents, schools, and governments to decide how to invest education, and is the effective tool of improving education resource utilization efficiency and enhancing school management, and is the necessary basic materials of researchers currently, education cost accounting problem is still in the phase of discussing and studying in theory. In this paper, we will use Activity-Based Costing to build university education cost accounting system.The thesis firstly starts with the basic theory of education cost and Activity-Based Costing to introduce definition and classification of the education cost, and the principles of the education cost accounting and to introduce the basic concept and accounting model of the Activity-Based Costing, and the generation of the Activity -Based Costing. Activity Based Costing is the cost computing method based on the basis of Activity. It traces the cost of products through increasing the amount of kinds of activity reasons, and thus can efficiently improve the cost precision.Then combine the characteristic of university education cost and the accounting application characteristic of Activity-Based Costing to analyze the application of the Activity - Based Costing and the feasibility of the university education cost accounting. The direct charge is less and the indirect charge is more in university education cost and the occurring driver differs so that different resources, activities, cost drivers should be concretely analyzed to distribute and collect charges to calculate the cost. The education cost differs very much among different levels of universities and different majors of students. At present, most of comprehensive universities have already had computer hardware basis with the popularization of electronic accounting in some degree, which can satisfy the outer conditional need of carrying out Activity-Based Costing.Finally, from the view of actual practice, according to the usual calculating procedure and combing the general characteristic of university education cost accounting, the general design procedures to study the university's activity cost accounting system are as followings: The first step is to fix and quantify the depletionof various resources and then put the value of resource depletion into each resource pool; The second step is to analyze the resource driver and confirm the activity; The third step is to analyze the way of activity depletion driver and fix the activity driver; The fourth step is to calculate the distribution ratio of resource diver and distribute the resource to the activity center; The fifth step is to calculate the distribution ratio of the activity driver and distribute the activity cost to different objects of cost calculation.