MAKING ACCOUNTING relevant & attractive.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: Statistical Data Included

With enrollments down and even practicing accountants and educators saying that if given the choice again, they'd chose another profession, people in accounting are talking about changing the approach not only to get better but to survive.

There's a crisis in accounting education in the United States. After hearing warnings for years, educators are aware that the environment must change in order to be relevant, valuable and continue to attract students to the profession. Indeed, there has been significant change -- but apparently, not enough.

A recently published report documents findings from a study commissioned by four major groups with a common desire to improve accounting education. The report, Accounting Education: Charting the Course Through a Perilous Future, authored by professors W. Steve Albrecht of Brigham Young University and Robert J. Sack of the University of Virginia, makes bold and sweeping recommendations for an environ ment that the authors say "cries out for action." The four groups are the American Accounting Association, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Institute of Management Accountants, and representatives from the Big Five (Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers).

The American Accounting Association's president, Mary Stone, offered her perspectives on the problems and the recommendation in the report. Stone, a CPA and the Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting at the University of Alabama, spoke with Financial Executive's Managing Editor Ellen M. Heffes.

Q. The title of the study is provocative, and the list of supporting organizations impressive. What prompted the study at this point in time?

A. The study was prompted by a sense of frustration on the parts of accounting educators and employers -- [based on] a suspicion that accounting education, and perhaps business education overall, wasn't keeping pace with economic change, and a recognition that there were not enough high-quality accounting graduates. Technology has freed accountants from the tedium of traditional bookkeeping and set the stage for them to provide higher value services, yet employers questioned whether students were developing the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to provide such services.

Refered to as the "Perilous Future Project," the study provides evidence that education has indeed fallen behind, and calls for accounting educators to change what and how they teach. It's my hope that the Perilous Future project will not be viewed simply as "an accounting study," as I'm convinced many of the problems identified and the recommendations provided are as relevant to other university and college business majors as they are to accounting.

It's notable that this project was undertaken because representatives of the firms and...