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Three Suggestions For Professionalizing The Accounting
Curriculum
by Dr. James W. Deitrick, PhD
Does the accounting curriculum at your college or university
provide students with a sufficient number of opportunities to develop
a realistic sense of the profession today? If the answer is no, or if
you are not sure, then this article may be of interest to you. In the
following article, I will describe three features that can be added individually
or in combination and at little or no cost to most accounting programs.
The benefits of incorporating these features include accounting majors
who are more aware of the multi-faceted nature of their profession, better
understanding its challenges and opportunities, as well as students with
improved critical thinking abilities and stronger communications skills.
Specifically, the three features are a lyceum program, case-oriented classes
and a case competition, and a formal internship program.
Lyceum Program
In 1985, the University of Texas started its Professional
Program in Accounting (PPA), an innovative response to the widely anticipated
150-hour legislation being considered by the AICPA. Students typically
begin study in the PPA during the fall semester of their junior year and
continue forward for the next three years. Upon completion, graduates
are awarded both the Bachelor of Business Administration and Master in
Professional Accounting degrees. An important and unique feature of the
PPA is its weekly lyceum series held each fall semester.
A special lyceum course is developed for juniors just starting
out in the PPA and a second lyceum course is available to students in
their second and third years. Candidates in the traditional Master in
Professional Accounting program (these students already hold undergraduate
degrees from Texas or other institutions) are invited to attend the latter
lyceum. Each lyceum course meets once a week for 75 minutes, is offered
on a credit/no credit basis, and requires attendance. The content of each
lyceum is carefully developed by a faculty member (usually the program
director) to meet the changing professional and academic needs of the
students as they progress through the program.
The following topics are presented here as examples of what
could be incorporated into a lyceum program. The first-year lyceum usually
begins with a general orientation session that covers the requirements,
policies, procedures, and expectations of the program. Time usually remains
for a general question and answer period. In the past, the orientation
session has been followed by a few workshops introducing PPA students
to the school's computer systems and to several accounting and business
software packages which they are expected to use throughout their programs.
These sessions, which are very much "hands on," are usually conducted
by a team comprised of faculty members and representatives from the accounting
profession.
For the rest of the semester, speakers from business and
government come to campus to talk with the students about potential career
paths for which accounting majors have competitive advantages. The speakers
are normally partners, controllers or assistant controllers, accounting
managers, and other appropriate individuals selected from the top ranks
of key organizations. These sessions are primarily intended to focus on
information dissemination rather than recruiting. Speakers typically cover
such areas as auditing, taxation (public accounting and corporate), consulting,
management information systems, investment banking, commercial lending,
internal auditing, corporate financial reporting, and not-for-profit organizations.
This lyceum not only helps students identify possible areas of concentration
for their upper-level courses, but they also make students more aware
of accounting as a valuable field of study and of the numerous opportunities
and challenges that lie ahead. It is usually not difficult to find qualified
speakers willing to discuss their personal experiences and perceptions
with college students.
The lyceum program for second- and third-year students is
organized around contemporary accounting and business topics of a rather
broad nature. As with the first lyceum, most speakers are from the business
world. They are invited to speak because of their special expertise, leadership
positions, or familiarity with an important topic or problem. These sessions
have included presentations about such topics as the consolidation movement
in public accounting, international accounting and reporting, auditing
for fraud detection, gender issues in the workplace, the process for developing
accounting standards, company philosophies regarding risk management,
accounting and sports management, the Governmental Accounting Standards
Board (GASB), business issues involving intellectual capital and other
intangibles, derivative transactions, and several specific tax topics.
As intended, this lyceum assists in putting accounting students on the
cutting-edge of current practice and enhances their understanding of the
profession they are about to enter, either on a full-time basis or as
interns.
The entire lyceum program at Texas has been immensely popular
with the students and with the business community. Although it is a relatively
low cost endeavor for the accounting department, a lyceum series probably
will require a faculty member to assume responsibility for planning, coordinating,
and implementing each session. But given the broad range of benefits from
having a successful program, faculty cooperation should be easily attainable.
The Use of Cases
Another way of bringing professionalism to the accounting
curriculum is through the use of cases. Accounting textbooks at all levels
seem to include an increasing number of "real world" cases in their end-of-chapter
materials. A case catalog and individual cases also may be obtained from
several organizations including the Harvard Business School, the Colgate-Darden
School of the University of Virginia, and the AICPA. In addition, there
are several good casebooks on the market today that can be used if one
wishes to offer an entire accounting course built around the case methodology.
By taking a case course, students should significantly improve their research
skills, analytical reasoning, and presentation abilities. Such a course
also allows them to learn the historical details of real business and
accounting problems faced by authentic companies. Moreover, the unstructured
case environment helps students develop and evaluate alternative solutions
for these problems and appreciate their likely impact on the company and
its different strategies.
In addition, we have supplemented the accounting curriculum
at Texas with an annual case competition. Up to 20 teams of four students
each compete in a fall tournament. Procedurally, the teams receive the
case mid-week and they immediately begin to organize their solution. Each
team makes a 30-minute presentation Friday morning to a panel of judges
(each panel contains a professor, a practicing accountant, and another
representative from the business community). The top four teams are invited
back for the afternoon's final round. The finals are open to the general
public (e.g. students, faculty, administration, and local business leaders)
and is video taped for future reference and review. As an incentive or
reward, each member of the winning team receives a $1,000 scholarship
and members of the second place team receive $500 each. The scholarships
are provided by the tournament's sponsor, Ernst & Young LLP.
This type of competition helps students learn first-hand
many important lessons about teamwork, time pressure, organization, delegation
of duties, the elements of effective presentations and how to respond
with poise and confidence to a panel of critical business people. Spirited
competition such as this enables students to assess their individual strengths
and weaknesses, and it helps them identify some personal and professional
areas where improvement is needed. Subsequent coursework or other relevant
experiences can help students overcome their deficiencies and capitalize
on their advantages. For the accounting department, the use of cases and
a case competition are relatively low cost ventures with tremendous educational
potential for students.
Internships
The final suggestion for professionalizing the accounting
curriculum involves an internships program. Such a program can be somewhat
more costly and difficult for some accounting departments to offer, especially
if academic credit is to be awarded for the internship experience. At
Texas, PPA and MPA students may select an internship as an elective course
under the supervision of a faculty member. The faculty coordinator works
closely with each company taking an intern in order to verify that the
agreed upon terms and conditions are being met. These terms include, but
are not limited to, sufficient professional training and education, adequate
supervision and mentoring, and the required preparation of an employment
log (diary) and research paper.
In order to accommodate a large number of students wanting
internships, and considering the preferences of companies for interns
during different spans of time during the spring semester, some creative
thinking was needed. For example, accounting firms are especially interested
in having audit (or similar-type) interns beginning in January, while
taxation interns are not in great demand until March. From a curriculum
perspective, students with spring internships also usually want to make
significant academic progress toward their degrees. As a result of compromise
and several good-faith discussions, it was determined that the audit interns
should work from early January to mid-March; they then return to campus
to take two accelerated graduate accounting courses. In contrast, the
tax interns take two accelerated graduate courses from early January (starting
before the spring semester officially begins) through late February. They
then go out to serve their internships through April 15 or later. Because
of the faculty's commitment to our graduate programs, and with the cooperation
of the administration, student and faculty schedules have been modified
so that these accelerated courses have the same number of contact hours,
as do comparable semester-long classes.
With some creativity and hard work, a successful internship
program should provide many positive returns for the students, sponsoring
companies, faculty, and the curriculum. Faculty members have especially
noticed improved performances from students after they return from their
internships. Interns usually bring to campus a renewed enthusiasm and
interest in accounting, an important professional perspective, an expanded
work ethic, and a broader understanding of the business world. These carryover
effects are difficult to fully identify and measure, but they are very
real and important.
Conclusion
From our experiences at the University of Texas, I strongly
recommend a lyceum series, case projects and formal internship programs
to any school looking for successful, low cost ways to enhance the professional
nature of its programs. Moreover, these features can be used to help keep
faculty and students up-to-date about accounting and its allied disciplines,
as well as to make them aware of the perceptions, beliefs, and practices
found throughout the business world. These projects can also help improve
the valuable relationships between accounting programs and their important
external constituencies. To meet the dynamic challenges that lie ahead,
colleges and universities should seriously consider these and other innovative
ways to enhance the professional education of its accountants.
Over the past three years, spring internships at Texas have
grown from 128 in 1995 to 153 in 1997. Not everyone who wants an internship
is able to get one. All companies willing to take interns conduct several
interviews and go through their usual selection processes.
Dr. James W. Deitrick is an accounting professor at the
University of Texas at Austin.
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