The shortage of accountants has become a major
However, a smaller part of the accounting community also encounters pipeline challenges without attracting as much attention: researchers and faculty members. According to the Journal of College, Teaching and Learning, the number of accounting doctorates has continued to
As a result, major organizations such as the
(To read the first part of this series, which focuses on the contribution of academic journals to the world of business and learning, click
Efforts to bring more instructors to the field
Jan Taylor, AICPA academic in residence and senior director, said that CPA professors bring the teaching of academic subjects to life by sharing their experience and knowledge of the profession with their students, thus becoming a critical part of the candidates' journey toward a CPA license. However, the declining number of accounting educators and Ph.D students puts this learning opportunity more and more at risk.
As a result, the AICPA Foundation created the
"Because many CPAs earning a doctoral degree in accounting or related fields go on to become accounting professors, they help shape the future of the profession through mentoring the next generation of students and researchers," said Taylor. "They encourage and mentor students to major in accounting, and having more accounting graduate students is a win for the longevity of the profession."
She added that there are many trends impacting the amount of accounting educators in the United States, with the pandemic playing a big role in them. For example, COVID-19 caused a shift in generational expectations, an overall decline in college enrollment, and a rapidly changing technology environment. The ADS program aims to fix some of these trends by recruiting CPAs to enroll in Ph.D programs and join the faculty at universities and colleges throughout the country.
Since the program's creation, the AICPA has recruited and funded 161 candidates with relevant practical experience in the program. Taylor explained the ADS program is about identifying practicing CPAs who have the potential to become great educators for the next generation of professional accountants. For instance, she sees CPAs with recent professional experience as perfect messengers for the central role technology plays in all areas of today's profession.
"As we operate in a world of accelerated change, the skills we need in our profession continue to evolve," said Taylor. "Skills like analytical thinking and communication are essential in today's business environment. For example, entry-level CPAs are currently handling procedures that require deeper critical thinking, problem-solving, and professional judgment than in prior years."
To address the gap, the AICPA and the
For scholars, the biggest challenge is finding a research project that is both relevant and important to the profession. Taylor explained that the AICPA could help them narrow their scope. While the organization does not share its membership roster, many professionals are willing to support faculties in their search for a study topic. As a result, AICPA & CIMA are partnering with the
"Much of the research published by accounting professors has real-world applicability for the profession," said Taylor. "All types of organizations, from CPA firms to nonprofits to governments to corporations, benefit from their findings in subjects as diverse as taxation, financial reporting, auditing, data analytics, ESG, cybersecurity and information systems, to name only a few."
Kim Watty, a member of the
Standard-setting boards, especially the International Sustainability Standards Board, are also working with academic organizations to help gather data and understand how to enhance their internal strategy and decision-making. Others, like IFAC, have built a set of education standards that direct the foundational skills and competencies of professional and aspiring accountants.
But according to Helen Partridge, IFAC's head of education, different jurisdictions naturally have different systems that build on this foundation to train and accredit professional accountants, plus different oversight structures for education. She sees that as one of the strengths — and simultaneously, one of the challenges — of accounting education: As a global profession, it constantly needs input from around the world that recognizes this complex, interwoven academic environment.
"This ecosystem drives collaboration not only between professional accountancy organizations but also between jurisdictional stakeholders ... to work together and build on each other's insights," said Partridge. "It is a global network of overlapping and interconnected ideas and initiatives, not a singular global approach that doesn't understand or respect jurisdictional differences, but shares challenges, possibilities and opportunities."
IFAC's goal, as a global organization, is to work with its member organizations to make strides in accounting education and advocate both for international education standards and increase the focus on key areas like sustainability and technology. These principles help ensure accounting professionals have the right initial training and ongoing professional development to meet changing market needs, including researchers. Partridge said these partnerships allow the organization to see similarities within a region and connect members facing similar challenges.
Since last year, for example, IFAC has been in communication with North African and Middle Eastern member organizations to understand some of the barriers to adopting new and revised education standards. During these conversations, Partridge said similar challenges were identified around aligning university curricula with the standards students were assessed against during qualification.
"One initiative we were able to execute in hand with the World Bank was a regional conference for accountancy education stakeholders to highlight initiatives within the region and other regions that have faced similar challenges and are overcoming them," said Partridge. "It is also through working with our member organizations that IFAC assesses the global adoption status of international standards, which have been fully adopted in 21% of the jurisdictions in which IFAC has a member organization, and partially adopted in another 77%."
Partridge said it sometimes takes years for changes to the standards to filter down to the university level in certain jurisdictions, especially where another stakeholder oversees curricula. Adoption and implementation of standards are not immediate, and neither are less formal initiatives that could encourage more students to pursue a Ph.D.
The reality of being a Ph.D student
Brian Forsberg, a Ph.D student in accounting at the University of Illinois, found inspiration in becoming a professor because of his undergraduate instructors in college. Forsberg has worked in tax for seven years, but says that accounting research has always been at the back of his mind because he loved the teaching aspect of academia.
He said there might not be a lot of students pursuing a Ph.D in accounting because he sees research as a career whose value people understand later, after getting some experience in the professional field. Forsberg explained that people almost never choose an accounting major because they want to become a researcher, but with the goal of becoming a CPA. In his case, Forsberg started seriously considering pursuing a Ph.D once he felt he was no longer learning and that his job stagnated into selling the services of the firm and managing clients' expectations.
"In accounting research, the most exciting part is that you have full autonomy in what you get to study and I decided to focus on tax," said Forsberg. "So I look into questions like: How do the taxes impact accounting information? How do they impact real business decisions as far as recruitment and investment in the next R&D projects? With this career, you basically get paid to learn, and that's exactly what I want to be doing."
Forsberg said there used to be greater demand for accounting professors, with more heavily advertised and financed programs to address the shortage in the auditing and tax fields for doctorates. According to the AAA, the number of accounting faculty
A member of the initiative himself, Forsberg said the program originally welcomed 20 candidates a year but only counted four students at the time of his selection.
The pandemic played a big role in reducing the number of applications for ADS during his year, and Forsberg said the program mainly became a scholarship opportunity for practicing accountants interested in getting a Ph.D. Becoming part of the initiative starts with a Zoom call with accounting professors and doctoral students who explain what life in academia looks like, what skills candidates are going to develop over the next five years, and what sacrifices a doctorate entails.
"It's a sacrifice for people who have been working for a while to take almost a $70,000 pay cut for the next five years for a chance at an academic position, so it's certainly a harder sell," said Forsberg. "Especially now that the shortage of professors has kind of taken care of itself, the academic job market has become a little bit more competitive."
However, Forsberg said such a compromise is worth it for people interested in understanding the core of their profession, with a lot of interesting trends developing around artificial intelligence. The introduction of ChatGPT became "the big talk" of many accounting research papers, and technology projects are among the most effective at influencing the business world. For example, researchers in machine automation look at how to improve accounting information for financial analysts.
At the University of Illinois, some professors are working on virtual reality to examine the implications of virtual boardrooms and whether they help mergers, acquisitions and other types of negotiations. Forsberg said that academia gives scholars the opportunity to study whatever is on the cutting edge and to have the resources to answer the questions firms may not have the tools to address. With statistical programs and other emerging technologies, he said that researchers have been more effective than ever at crunching numbers and analyzing complex data.
"I can't speak for everybody, but I believe we're treated very well in terms of resources, compared to other disciplines such as languages or liberal arts programs, which go through much more funding struggles," said Forsberg. "When you don't need to worry so much about money, you can focus on learning how to conduct good research and developing the skill sets you need to become an accounting researcher."
Most accounting research does not require expensive laboratories and costs less than some other areas of scholarly academic endeavors, which the IPAE's Watty considers to be important in a post-pandemic environment when university budgets are constrained. However, she said that individuals should be careful not to put accounting in the background because while they are often relegated to the bottom of the agenda, accounting matters can quickly become urgent in a complex global environment.
For example, many technology-related issues that were considered long-term before the pandemic suddenly became a priority, as people needed solutions to continue working. Similarly, Watty said that the short-term could become redundant just as quickly. However, she indicated that sustainability will surely remain one of the most pressing areas for research, specifically as it applies to an organization's operations.
"Accountancy education has changed in recent years to include more interdisciplinary education and more applied learning, such as case studies and practical experience," said Watty. "Educators also increasingly work to embed within their curriculum the types of soft skills their students will need in the workforce: communications, cultural awareness, problem-solving, teamwork and critical thinking, to name a few."
But those competencies, which Forsberg sharpened during his time as a tax accountant, are no more distinctive than those required in a research setting. Understanding causal inference, which is a process by which a researcher establishes causation between a phenomenon and its effects, is not the same thing as filing a tax return or calculating a tax rate for a corporation. Forsberg said that jumping into academia requires a steep learning curve that takes a lot of time, effort and dedication.
However, he said the hardest thing about research is finding a real-world setting in which to test accounting research questions. The accounting field is notorious for its continuous changes in regulations and standards, and Forsberg said researchers often focus on measuring the effects of those modifications.
But only a few firms are willing to let researchers catch a glimpse of how they navigate those changes, and scholars then need to rely on and make inferences from data that's complex, hard to interpret and often incomplete. It gets even more difficult in tax research because most of the data the IRS gets is private and even more complicated to get one's hands on.
"I guess there's always this tension with businesses who don't want to report information to places where they're not required to," said Forsberg. "But in the long run, the more information companies can give to the public, the more strides accounting research can make. From a governmental standpoint, providing accurate information helps create more informed policies and supports the research community toward providing the most beneficial inferences for investors."
As a whole, Forsberg believes colleges and universities need to do a better job of promoting accounting as a flexible environment and a major that can apply to multiple disciplines. For example, undergraduate students can put their skills toward getting an MBA or become a consultant in fields such as renewable energy. To compete with engineering, computer science or data science majors, which promise financial stability in an environment of economic instability, Forsberg said it's critical for schools to present the long-term benefits of the accounting profession.
Forsberg enrolled in college right after the recession. The accounting department attracted students by emphasizing the stability of the field, claiming firms wouldn't lay you off because they always needed people. However, Forsberg said professionals need to move away from that rhetoric and address students' current concerns, which focus more on starting salaries, work-life balance and diversity. While firms have started responding to that trend, he believes universities still have a long way to go to adapt and make accounting more attractive to prospective students.
To inspire the next generation of accountants, Partridge recommends increased collaboration with other departments, since many accountants' activities are now multidisciplinary. Additionally, professors should make a greater effort to increase where the language of accounting can take students and which skills and competencies they'll acquire throughout their careers, especially in their junior year.
"Debits and credits are still needed, but they also need to be taught in the context of systems and the inputs, processing and outputs of those systems," said Partridge. "Knowing what should be produced by a system and why it should be that way allows us to identify errors. Being able to analyze data and holistic financial statements along with nonfinancial information, and how these can be used to inform the strategy of a company, I think it is the mindset that needs to shift the most."
