The Rutgers Graduate School of Management project is designed to implement a revolutionary change in the training of graduate students for careers in professional accounting. The program focuses on an MBA education geared towards accounting with full integration of business and accounting subjects.

Students in the Professional Accounting MBA program at Rutgers are predominantly from non-accounting backgrounds, often the social sciences. The training must therefore provide an increased business orientation, while preserving the wide, socially aware world view provided by a liberal arts education.

Integration is obtained through an information/decision process where topics from different disciplines are broken down into their basic components (coverage points) and are then brought together into a coherent framework.

For example, areas such as sampling have been removed from the accounting core and are now covered in the MBA statistics course instead. In addition, financial ratio analysis and part of analytical review are being taught as one decision module. The lease module encompasses the following topics in this order: 1) the economic base for leases, 2) accounting for leases, 3) tax effects and considerations, and 4) project decision involving leases.

Throughout the program, a pervasive socialization program works to develop students’ attitudes and skills to foster the development of broad-based, tooled-for-life-learning professionals. Through the use of a variety of teaching methods, students will acquire a highly honed set of basic technical skills and positive attitudes. To this end, the curriculum is designed to contain three distinct periods. First, an intensive “unfreezing” of current student attitudes and beliefs, followed by a body of “change,” and concluding with a series of experiences aimed at “refreezing” the new attitudes and skills.

During the unfreezing period a mix of SEC enforcement cases, business cases and intensive background instruction is being used to generate an attitude of openness to change and a questioning of values. The change phase brings in the defined body of knowledge and develops a set of attitudes and skills. The refreezing stage emphasizes an increased set of professionally related experiences developed in conjunction with professional associates (business and not-for-profit organizations) aimed at integration and transition to the working life. This stage also instills in the student an attitude of life-long learning.

Basic to this effort is the development of a well defined communication network between the student and the teacher. This network is to be very general in nature, accessible to everyone, and adaptable to a wide set of different institutional constraints.

Faculty members are designing courses that encompass a coherent mix of teaching materials using, at least in part, a communication network. For example, a project may require development of a basic set of viewgraphs to be presented using a laptop computer and an LCD projection device. The graphs could be printed for notetaking or distributed through electronic mail. A more extensive background reading may relate to a textbook, statute, or other type of material.