Cost Management Practices : A Cross-Country Study with Special Reference to Higher Educational Institutions in India

Higher education in India still does not have a transparent and robust mechanism to ascertain the costs of the services rendered at different levels. It has been observed that the prevalent costing methodologies practiced in most of the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in India are at a nascent stage and ardently follow the old traditional costing practices directed towards the statutory compliance of the funding agencies and most often are guided by the instructions of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), Government of India (GOI). In addition, the cost allocation methods being practiced so far are not adequately capable of explaining the fully quantifiable tailor-made outputs. The important noticeable fact is that universities in India lack a uniform and standard costs reporting format in comparison to those of the developed countries. This paper broadly focuses on understanding, analyzing and extracting the commonalities in the costing methodology practiced in the universities of some selected countries, with special emphasis on the universities of India, which would further help in developing a uniform costing framework