Educating students for expanded financial planning careers.

• Author: Nellen, Annette

CPAs and accounting educators have recognized for several decades that, as the profession evolves, it must focus on preparing students for expanded future accounting careers--to ensure their students' continued value and relevance for years to come. Tax educators face a particularly challenging dilemma as they encounter an increasingly complex and growing body of knowledge, but they have relatively few credit courses or class hours in which to impart such essential knowledge.

Students and traditional employers appear to already perceive this shifting paradigm, as is reflected in recent downward trends in the number of accounting majors, CPA Exam candidates, and students obtaining tax specializations at the undergraduate or graduate level. These trends may also reflect personal characteristics of current Millennials and Gen Z students and young professionals, who are seeking the most interesting and rewarding work/life experiences.

Tax professors and textbooks have been responding to these challenges by increasing the emphasis on tax planning, even within a one-semester, introductory tax course. The AICPA Model Tax Curriculum, most recently revised in 2014, recognizes this importance. The third learning outcome of the model curriculum requires that students learn to "apply analytical reasoning tools to assess how taxes affect economic decisions for individuals and business entities." The model curriculum appendix further suggests incorporating tax planning cases into the coursework.

But even with this recognition and emphasis, tax planning concepts are difficult to incorporate into a single tax course. Furthermore, tax faculty must remain attuned to the fact that basic tax coverage is still included on the CPA Exam, which some percentage of their students will wish to be prepared for and pass. Additionally, although tax course-incorporated planning concepts are important and clearly of interest to students, such instruction may still be considered relatively rules-based and compliance-oriented to this generation of students. Also, given the limited number of total hours in the accounting discipline that can generally be offered within either an undergraduate or graduate degree program, and in light of the multitude of other business, general education, mission-specific, and/or other leading-edge curricular topics, such as forensics or data analytics, it may not be reasonable to expect most accounting programs to incorporate additional tax classes or hours in tax-designated subjects.

One subject area that integrates well with tax instruction and that appears to be increasingly attractive to students, university administrators, and...