Education is presently set in an environment that is curiously paradoxical in nature. Curricula which give appropriate emphasis to the multivariate character of business problems should not be circumscribed unduly, yet, an overexposure to the myriad of complex influences which compound the difficulty of problem solution may well create for the average student a greater measure of confusion than resolution. Educators have long recognized this phenomenon and have increasingly sought to provide the student with an atmosphere of business and to develop in him an appreciation of the relevance of his field of special interest. This belief in the importance of relating the various business stimuli and the collateral disciplines in a climate which focuses attention on the practical problems of decision-making has resulted in a number of significant educational innovations. In general, they are all essentially variants of two basic concepts namely interim work experience programs and scale simulation, in the classroom, of the interaction of the various business influences.

The article informs that much of the accounting data used in management control and administrative decision making is a product of antecedent processes of cost allocation and expense distribution. Both of these operations assume the validity of cost divisibility and recombination. Existing practices of accountants in allocating costs and expenses to relevant production orders, products, processes and/or departments would appear to confirm the general acceptability of such an assumption. Effective cost control depends upon an identification of costs with responsibility centers, and the calculation of unit costs is especially important in measuring product or process profitability. In the analysis of costs, an important first problem which confronts the accountant is the measurement of benefits to be derived from the cost or expense elements which are not dearly identifiable with specific departments or cost centers. The reliability of successive allocations necessarily rests upon this first, basic determination. Once the interdepartmental relationships, or associations, are established quantitatively, there remains a second problem of arithmetically distributing costs in the previously established allocation ratios.