Guide to Making Activity-Based Costing Meaningful and Practical

Maria Anguiano, Senior Advisor

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Post-Secondary Education Success
The higher education industry and its observers have wrung hands over rising costs for years. While there are many reasons for escalating costs, there is at least one that higher education leadership has complete control over and could start addressing immediately. The fact of the matter is, there is almost a complete lack of visibility on how much it actually costs to deliver post‐secondary education and how those costs compare with the outcomes achieved. While the “measuring higher education outcomes” portion of the equation has been receiving growing national attention, the “cost to deliver” portion of the equation has received much less attention. Both issues must be addressed. Accurately measuring costs and comparing them with outcomes is one of the most important strategies that can be pursued in transforming the economics of higher education.

About the Author: Maria Anguiano currently serves as the Vice Chancellor for Planning and Budget for University of California, Riverside. Prior to this role, she was the Chief of Staff to the CFO of the UC system. In this capacity she worked on improving the administrative and operational effectiveness of the University as a key tenet of long-term sustainability and affordability for California residents. In addition, in the past year, she served as a senior advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Post-Secondary Success Team.  She is also a member of the State of California’s Private Post-secondary Education Advisory Council. Prior to working at UC, Maria was a public finance investment banker at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital. Maria has also worked as a CPA at Deloitte where she performed financial statement audits for firms in a diverse set of industries and nonprofit organizations. She graduated magna cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a BA in Economics and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.