MEASURING THE COST OF ACTIVITIES PERFORMED AT THE UNIVERSITY

The universities are, like any organization, more and more drastically faced with the question “how much cost the our products (students, courses etc.)?” and “Are these cost justified?”. In order to answer this question, more or more often the activity based costing method is used, where an intermediate step – measuring the cost of university activities – is necessary. The problem is that the specificity of the activities performed at the university makes them extremely difficult to measure, especially the cost of research and course preparation activities are difficult to determine. In the paper a method of approximate research/teaching activity cost measurement, taking into account subjective expert opinions of the research and teaching staff, is applied to university activities. The method is based on the well known AHP method and will help to answer the questions about the cost of university activities and products.