A Study Of Educational Costs And Its Calculation Of Colleges And Universities

Due to the lack of cost awareness, it has been a long time for China's higher education to be hindered by both the low level of cost management and the serious waste of educational resources. With the establishment of market-oriented socialist economy and the deepening system reforms of higher education in recent years, however, great attention and concerns from society as well as governments have been given to the issue of average educating costs per student. According to the modern theory of cost management and using for reference the experiences in enterprise cost management, others' research results and the over 10 years of financial and accounting experiences of my own, in this article I focus on the issue of average educating costs per college student and its calculation. It is my hope that this research can be of a little help or use to solve such problems as the weak awareness of costs widely existing in today's colleges and universities, the low efficiency in resource allocation and the inability to provide relatively accurate information about educating costs conveniently and promptly, and so on. Consequently all the investing factors in higher education can be optimized, the urgent requirement for colleges and universities from society can be met and a healthy development of colleges and universities can be sustained.In the article I firstly discussed the meaning of higher education cost, then from the necessity of managing and calculating the costs of higher education, I went on to advance the premises and principles we should follow while doing it, and at the same time I produce the calculating procedures and methods too. Secondly, by analyzing expenditures of colleges and universities, I summed up the cost items of them, on the basis of which I put forward relatively more convenient calculating methods. At last, based on the financial data of a certain college of 2005 in Sichuan province, I conducted an empirical study of average educating costs per student.The management and calculation of higher education costs is not only an important part of college administration, but also a key link of college financial administration, and it is both theoretical and practical. Because of the differences among colleges and universities, an in-depth analysis and study of them are to be made when we calculate average educating costs per student, so that more accurate and scientific calculations are likely to be carried out, which is helpful to evaluate the performance of educating costs.