Calculating the final cost of the educational services of Kerman school of Management and Information Sciences through activity-based costing

Considering the goals of development packages and innovations in medical education, it seems indispensable to develop an appropriate costing system to inform the cost of education. The purpose of this study was to calculate the final cost of the educational services in the School of Management and Information Sciences through activity-based costing method.

In this study, all college expenses were classified in the academic years 2014-2015 based on the breakdown of the cost of the chapters and clustered into three groups of educational, administrative, financial and supportive activities. Finally, the cost of each student was calculated based on the number of students, the level and field of study using the Stata software version 14 and as well as using analytical statistical methods and by activity-based costing method.

The results show that the highest cost was related to the costs of the first chapter (i.e., personnel costs) and the cost of training the student in the two conventional and activity-based costing methods was completely different. In fact, in the conventional method, the education cost of one student was 159,469,350 Rials, which included all three levels of education, while in the activity-based costing approach, and due to the decline in activities, the cost of a student was calculated 768,445,395 Rials only for Ph.D. level.

The findings showed that the activity-based costing can be done based on the cost chapters and the calculation of all activities which in turn appeared effective in the calculation of the cost of training the students and can be applied to decisions of the health system policy makers to allocate the budget and share resources.