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II.
Key Concerns Regarding Business and Accounting Education
In recent years,
various stakeholders have voiced numerous concerns about
business and accounting education.
Business
Education
According to the
AACSB (AACSB, 1996), business schools are not keeping pace
with practice:
- Lack of
real-world business contact - Generally, faculties at
most schools of business have little ongoing, substantive
contact with business. Consequently, the AACSB report
suggests that business practices are ahead of academic
programs, and both curriculum and research are becoming less
and less relevant to practice.
- Failure to
exploit information technology - Business schools are
behind in adopting IT into their programs. Schools fall
short in the use of IT, both as an integrative mechanism
across the curriculum and as a delivery method for serving
students, any time, any place.
- Barriers to
change - Business school faculties have been reluctant
to revise their programs to match the needs of rapidly
evolving business enterprises. The AACSB notes that a
significant proportion of the current faculty began their
careers in the late 60's and early 70's, are near
retirement, and tend to resist change. Tight budgets do not
provide adequate resources for reengineering business
curricula or for exploiting developments in IT, nor do
faculty incentive systems place a high priority on
maintaining currency in curriculum.
More recently, the
Boyer Commission (Boyer Commission, 1998) issued a stinging
indictment of undergraduate education at research universities
- including business education:
"Many
students graduate having accumulated whatever number of
courses is required, but still lacking a coherent body of
knowledge or any inkling as to how one sort of information
might relate to others. And all too often they graduate
without knowing how to think logically, write clearly, or
speak coherently. The university has given them too little
that will be of real value beyond a credential that will
help them get their first jobs. And with larger and larger
numbers of their peers holding the same paper in their
hands, even that credential has lost much of its potency
(p.5)."
Accounting
Education
In the last decade, accounting programs in the United States
have been repeatedly challenged to rethink their curricula in
light of rapid changes taking place in business and accounting
practice (Bedford Report, 1986; "Big 8" Perspectives
White Paper, 1989; various AECC Statements, 1991 through 1993;
Joint Research Project of IMA and FEI, 1994; AICPA Special
Committee on Financial Reporting, 1994; AICPA Special
Committee on Assurance Services, 1997; Elliott, 1997). These
reports have called for numerous changes in accounting
education:
- Scope -
Accounting education should be approached broadly as an
information development and distribution function for
economic decision making.
- Information
sets - GAAP/GAAS-based accounting education is much too
narrow. Programs need to consider a much broader range of
information sets and related assurance activities.
Accounting students need to gain knowledge of both "non-GAAP
financial" and "non-financial" measurement
methods and gain skills in applying them.
- Learning to
learn -The primary classroom objective should be to
emphasize students' learning to learn (i.e., developing in
students the motivation and capacity to continue to learn
outside the formal educational environment - AECC, 1990).
- Communication,
intellectual, and interpersonal skills - Accounting
students need to improve skills in: receiving and
transmitting information; locating and organizing
information and identifying and solving unstructured
problems in unfamiliar settings; and working effectively in
groups and providing leadership.
- Customer
focus - Accounting students need to develop a better
understanding of user decision processes and their needs for
information
- Migration to
higher value-added information activities - Accounting
students need to spend less time on activities involved in
converting business events into information and more on
activities involved in transforming information into
knowledge for decision making.
- Embrace
information technology - Accounting students need to
understand how IT is transforming all aspects of business
and need to learn to effectively use new developments in
hardware, software, communications, memory, encryption,
local area networks, internet and World Wide Web.
- Globalization
- Accounting students need to develop a global perspective
including an understanding of other economies, cultures, and
legal/regulatory systems in which business and accounting is
conducted worldwide.Current accounting programs are having
difficulties in responding to these criticisms for the same
reasons that business schools in general are struggling -
insufficient contact with practice, inadequate funding,
aging of the faculty, and faculty incentives.
The problems facing
business and accounting education are exacerbated by rapid
changes taking place in the market for post-secondary
education in business and accounting, which are briefly
described in the next section.
[Executive
Summary] [Appendix]
[Bibliography]
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