You think you finally have established the rules for determining which students belong to which campus. Your
Question:
You think you finally have established the rules for determining which students belong to which campus. Your reports clearly label your methodology so there is less confusion as to what is being counted. You can easily zero in a target population and know what questions to ask people looking for "numbers".
One day you get a call from one of the departments on campus (Department X). Department X pays a yearly subscription so that students can access electronic resources via the World Wide Web. The cost of this subscription service is based on the number of students enrolled. The head of department X (Professor Y) is distraught because the price of the subscription service has increased significantly from previous years. When they inquired as to why thy company quoted an enrollment number that seemed too high. In previous years the college provided this to the company so Professor Y looked through the old submissions and noticed the quoted number was over two times higher than last time.
You do some research and contact the company to find out where they got their numbers. It turns out that the company pulled the worldwide enrollments numbers not the main campus enrollment numbers. You inform Professor Y of your findings. Professor Y is in a real bind now. Budgets are really tight and this subscription is important to the department. It is mostly used at the main campus but Professor Y doesn't want to restrict it to only main campus students. Doing so would cause a hardship for online students. Professor Y asks if there is anything you can do to help.
You don't think Professor Y is asking you to outright lie but maybe bend the truth. Depending on what criteria you use you can easily alter data by thousands of students. For example you could list yearly, worldwide, enrollments (one student can generate several enrollments). You could limit this population to the traditional school calendar (excluding summer enrollment). You could further reduce this by counting students and not enrollments (an unduplicated headcount). You can combine these criteria to produce an even smaller number such as headcount of main campus students enrolled in spring/fall.
Based on this information address the following:
- What recommendation(s) would you make to Professor Y?
- Do you feel it is ethical to provide a number other than the publicly available worldwide enrollment number given these circumstances? Why or why not?
Cost Management Accounting and Control
ISBN: 978-0324559675
6th Edition
Authors: Don R. Hansen, Maryanne M. Mowen, Liming Guan