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.

The success of any nation largely depends upon the spread of education down to the bottom layer of the society. The contribution of higher education is pivotal for the development of a knowledge-based society, which further propels the growth of a nation. Higher education in India, since the beginning, has been destined for perfection through strata of excellence in terms of accessibility, quality, affordability and technological innovation, with a vision to bring out a complete transformation of the society. The scorecard of higher education in India, in the past five decades, reveals a completely different story. The data gathered up to the 10^th Five-Year Plan reveals that students' enrollment ratio in higher education is still about 10.08%, in comparison to the world average of 23.20%. The public expenditure per student reduced by 20.57% from 1993-94 to 2003-04. The percent of plan expenditure on higher education to the total plan expenditure bogged down from the zenith of 25% in the 5^th Plan to the nadir of 6% in the 10^th Five-Year Plan.

The above discussion reveals the severity of financial constraints hovering around the HEIs in India. A handful chunk of budgeted plan allocation is being diverted to elementary education, which will remain the cynosure of the education policy of the GOI in the near future. An overview of the policy framework of the past ten Five-Year Plans reveals the fact that for the first time, since economic liberalization, in the 9^th Five-Year Plan, the GOI had expressed its concern and sensitivity towards the `resource mobilization' of the HEIs, which further remained consistent by on the top of priority even in the 10^th Five-Year Plan.

Accounting Research and Audit Practices, Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization, LPG, Cost Management System, Activity-Based Management, ABM, Higher Education Funding Council, HEFC, Cost Flow, Transparent Approach Towards Costing, TRAC, Higher Education Institutions, HEIs, Decisio Making, Costing Methodology.