Activity Based Costing (ABC) to Calculate the Cost of Training Students in School of Management and Medical Information Sciences

Introduction: Public higher education is competing for limited public funds. Activity-based costing (ABC) provides detailed evidence that higher education administrators and policy makers can be employed to allocate scare resources more effectively and better understand what education centers do. Conducting context-specific studies on ABC and budgeting for educational systems is the crux of the matter for cost containment and making decisions. The present study was undertaken with the aim of determining the costs of training undergraduate and postgraduate students. Methods: This is a descriptive-analytic and applied study. The costs incurred by 7 different disciplines and degrees including bachelor (n=2), master (n=4), and PhD (n=1) in the School of Management and Medical Information Sciences of the Shiraz University of Medical Science in the academic year 2015-16 were examined and costs of training undergraduate and postgraduate students were totaled by ABC method. The total number of students in included disciplines was 269; of them, 71% were studying in the bachelor, 26% in the master, and 3% in PhD programs. Since the primary purpose of our study was to calculate the total sum of cost per student, no sampling was done. After identifying the activity centers and incurred costs per activity center, the proportion of the schools’ costs to the university headquarter was traced. In the school level, the costs of non-faculty staff by the deputies of education, research, support, and cultural-student affairs were estimated. Moreover, other costs, namely energy costs, rentals, consumables, depreciation, and missions were determined and assigned based on the number of students. Data management and analysis were performed using Excel 2007. Results: The cost of training undergraduate students in the disciplines of health services management and health information technology was $24413±2891 and $24286±2926, respectively. The maximum cost of schooling a student in the master degree belonged to the discipline of medical informatics. The total cost of training a PhD student in the academic year 2014-2015 was $95303±16106. Conclusion: In an era of resource scarcity, the ability to recognize the gaps between resources and academic goals and redirect the resources into programs which maximize the value added is crucial for all higher education institutes.