An Analysis of the Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing System in Foundation Higher Education Organizations

Changes in globalization and technology have made the competition in the education sector more in-tense. This change in competition has reduced the profit margins of educational organizations. In order to maintain their market share and maintain their assets under these conditions, organizations have had to put greater stress on cost management. Today, cost management has moved beyond simply being a sub-system of accounting and has become one of the main tasks of business management. Higher education organizations need to use scarce resources effectively and efficiently to achieve their goals, develop long-term strategies, and maintain their existence. The extent to which resources are used by whom and for what time should be determined correctly. The outputs obtained during this process should be checked and interpreted correctly. This study was designed as a case study and conducted in a vocational school of a foundation university in Istanbul. The aim of this study is to examine the service production process in foundation vocational school with different costing methods and to compare the results. For this purpose, the costs of the vocational school for the 2016-2017 accounting period were calculated by using both the traditional costing method and the time-driven activity-based cost-ing method. These two methods were then compared to find out their degree of accuracy in calculating the program costs.