In March of each year, the ministry publishes the Operating Grants Manual showing estimated funding allocations for school districts for the upcoming school year. These estimates are based on enrolment projections. On September 30 of the new school year, enrolment is counted and the grants are recalculated based on actual enrolment. The ministry…

In order to make rational budgetary decisions, higher educational institutions require information on the impact of inflation on their operations. A simple and easily maintainable model from which price indices for a particular institution can be constructed is described. (Author/LBH)

This paper documents how the University of Oklahoma developed discipline cost indices which it then used in its budget allocation process. In order to overcome the interinstitutional comparison problems between universities which use different reporting and accounting methods, discipline cost indices were derived using data collected through the…

The derivation of discipline cost indexes, developed to permit accurate interinstitutional comparisons of relative costs among disciplines, is explained using expenditure data from five peer institutions. How the indexes have been used in one research university's budget allocation process is then described. (Author/MSE)

The steps involved in tailoring a periodical and monograph price index to a university library are examined, as are the difficulties involved in applying a simple methodology such as a price index when the data base has not been organized to play an active role in the decision-making process. The following topics are addressed: the shifting of…

The relationship between the costs of central administration and academic teaching and research production was studied, based on a large sample of British universities and a separate analysis of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. To determine variables important to central administration costs, a cross-sectional and intertemporal regression…