Within the last three years, American "post-secondary education" has acquired a new business language.1 This new semantic, most often referred to as the language of accountability is however much more than just a finance language used by college and university management consultants, business officers or comptrollers. The accountability semantic is in fact directly connected to a dollar-cost oriented philosophy of education and it is towards a better understanding of this philosophy that my paper is directed. I will be discussing the theory of administrative cost accounting known as "internal pricing" for the purpose of describing how it is currently affecting the operations of academic departments.