Template-type: ReDif-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Volmer,F.
Author-workplace-name: METEOR 
Title: The Financial Report of Colleges: maintaining.
Abstract: The Colleges (Dutch: Hogescholen) have gained an important position in the knowledge infrastructure. In 1999, the number of enrolled College students increased to nearly 300,000 and the number of College graduates to more than 50,000. Since the nineties, the higher education policy is characterized by deregulation and increasing autonomy. The Colleges have complete control concerning for example its financial policy, its accommodation policy and its conditions of employment. Consequently, the financial report of colleges have to demonstrate clearly how far the Colleges have attained their goals. In connection with the researches into the financial reports of Colleges in the USA and in the UK, 48 financial reports of Dutch Colleges (year: 1998) are investigated. See Tables 1-8. In spite of the reporting regulations, much variation in quality and quantity of the reporting was found, demonstrated by the high standard deviations showed in the Tables (especially concerning the providing of information about costs and output of education and research. To explain these findings, at first a number of well-known hypotheses were investigated such as the debt/equity hypothesis of Zimmerman. After that, a disclosure index was developed to express (summarize) the several information components in a unique report mark per College. The performance found can be explained based on earlier research by the next variables: -Kind of College; -Size of the College (students & revenues); -The size of the long-term debts Important findings are: the size and quality of financial reporting by Colleges can be explained by the long-term debts and the size of the Colleges.
Keywords: public economics ; 
Series: Research Memoranda
Creation-Date: 2001
Number: 023
File-URL: http://arnop.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=483
File-Format: application/pdf
File-Size: 229665
Handle: RePEc:unm:umamet:2001023