Approaches to Managing Costs in American Higher Education

Resumen

American Higher Education (AHE) is at a critical juncture. Issues discussed in this paper are related to tuition increase, cost escalation, and available alternative choices we discussed liquidity, stability and growth, sources of revenues and expenditures, cost models, institutional efforts, barriers to cost controls, and cost value chain. There is an increasing trend of closure or merger of smaller institutions being overburdened with debt servicing and increasing operating costs.  The present cost and revenue troubles in AHE are due to the mismanagement of costs and applications of traditional accounting systems. The paper explored several avenues of productivity increases.Keywords: Higher Education, Cost control, productivity, liquidity crisis in higher education, tuition, sources of revenues, sources of expenses, value chain, systems model, barriers to cost control, cost value chain.