Accounting Education Changes Course: Communication Skills and Real-World Cases Broaden the Syllabus
Twenty years ago detractors of accounting education were plentiful among practitioners and academics alike. The heart of their complaint was that university accounting curricula drilled students in rote technical memorization at the expense of the broader business, communication and analytical skills they needed in a real world changing at warp speed. Even recently such critics were easy to find. For example, five years ago in their widely read monograph "Accounting Education: Charting the Course through a Perilous Future," professors W. Steve Albrecht, CPA, CIA and CFE, and Robert J. Sack, CPA, said accounting education was so "outdated and broken" that failure to embrace reform could be fatal. Their findings were controversial, but few argued with the thrust of Albrecht and Sack's report: Educators needed to better align accounting curricula with workplace realities and alter their teaching methods to encourage critical thinking. The AICPA credited the pair with presenting "a compelling case for dramatically restructuring accounting education" and urged educators to "boldly reengineer their curriculums and programs using the roadmap provided by Professors Albrecht and Sack." Three years later, in "Educating for the Public Trust," PricewaterhouseCoopers said despite advances there still were important educational gaps, from not teaching university students interpersonal and communication skills to not inspiring a commitment to continuous learning. Fortunately, there are signs the harsh rap against accounting education may no longer be justified. Not only academics think so (though some say their curriculum and teaching improvements have gone largely unnoticed)--so do the firms hiring recent graduates. "They're better educated today than when I came out of college," says Bill Balhoff, CPA, CFE, audit director at the public accounting firm Postlethwaite & Netterville in Baton Rouge, La. CPA Jim Metzler, AICPA vice-president of small firm interests, agrees: "Young professionals are smarter, more business attuned vs. numbers attuned and good at being able to see the forest and not just the trees." Even Albrecht, now an Andersen Alumni professor of accounting at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, and associate dean of its school of management, sees some improvement. "It's not universal across all schools, but a lot of them have done some good things," he says. More ethics and fraud courses are being taught now, and there is increased attention to writing skills and class presentations. "There is a lot more case-based teaching, and a lot more of what I would call field studies, where students do projects in the real world. And the cases that are studied require more analytical skills." Of course there still are schools where professors prefer to rely on lecture-based teaching and textbooks (a content-only approach), but their numbers are dwindling. "We recognize that our students need better development of critical thinking, analytical and communication skills, and we're working on it," says CPA Karen Pincus, chair of the accounting department at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, speaking for the academic community at large. She says colleges don't always have the freedom to reengineer their curricula, however. In zealously supporting technical knowledge "a lot of state licensing agencies specify courses students should take. While that might be good for the curriculum at that moment, it quickly becomes cast in stone" and a roadblock to needed change. CPA Tom Schaeffer, professor and chair of the department of accountancy at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, Notre Dame, Ind., says many outside observers, even academics who've studied the issue, miss some of the real change that has taken place if they merely look at course titles or individual programs. Professor James Benjamin, CPA, head of the accounting department at Texas A&M University, College Station, agrees that many college-course titles have remained static while the teaching approach and content have changed for the better. …