Research On Optimization Of Budget Management System In Higher Education

With the rapid development of the socialist market economy in China, higher education is undergoing profound changes. To satisfy the requirement for the talents in higher education, colleges and universities are gradually moving towards the market, deepening the management system and working on the institution reform. Moreover, when the quality of higher education continuously improves and the scale expands simultaneously, the financing of institutions are more and more diversified.But the existing budget management principles exposed numerous shortcomings. The performance evaluation mechanism, in particular, did not receive enough attention, which led to deficiency of incentive and constraint mechanism. Some institutions nowadays adopt relatively simple budgeting techniques. Simple budgeting methods, however, can not control the expenses of all executive departments; on the other hand, it will cause inefficient resources allocation or even mismatch of resources. Conflicts between the budget management principles and its development increase gradually which calls for the reform and optimization of budget management.The thesis tries to analyze the current situation, problems and solutions to optimize the budget management mode in higher education, taking CN University as an example. CN University is a rising college which used to be an institution for Continuing Education. There are some prominent problems in its budget management, such as primitive methods of management, informal budget execution and so on. According to the existing literatures and researches, based on the current situation of budget management in Chinese colleges and experience from foreign institutions, this paper adopts the method of Case Study and puts forward some suggestions for improving the budget management code of CN University. More importantly, it is hoped that this paper could provide some references for the budget management of other similar colleges. This paper is divided into six parts. The first part explains the purpose, significance, method and the main points of the paper. The second part is the literature review, which illustrates and discusses the study of budget management in both China and foreign countries, especially the budget management in higher education. According to previous literature, institution in Chinese higher education should adopt the "adjusted measures" considering its own situation to establish a feasible and practical budget management code. The third part presents relative theories on budget management in higher education. The fourth part introduces the basic situation of CN University and the scale of revenue and expenditure, and then analyzes the problems and challenges in existing budget management of CN University. The fifth part confirms the basic concept of performance budget and proposes the optimization suggestions for budget management code in CN University, such as compilation method, executive process, performance evaluation and mechanism of reward and punishment. In the conclusion part, this paper suggests that in future budget management, CN University should introduce performance budget management code which is consistent with its own development. CN University should also adjust the performance valuation index and improve the mechanism of reward and punishment considering the actual situation and requirements. Only if CN University truly integrates the performance budget into financial management work, will the level and efficiency of budget management increase immensely in the future.In addition, some limitations still exist in this paper, such as the deficiency of fundamental materials due to the management flaws of CN University and the restriction of writer’s knowledge on management, mathematical statistics and so on.This paper contributes to the literature in the following two aspects. Firstly, the selection of the case, which is more open and reformative, could be of higher academic value and realistic significance. Secondly, the innovation of optimization ideas. To optimize the budget system of the studied case, based on relative theories, the author introduced some targeted performance valuation indexes according to the practical situation of CN University.