The Importance of Relevant Practical Experience among Accounting Faculty: An Empirical Analysis of Students' Perceptions

AACSB International maintains a requirement that accounting faculty, as a whole, should demonstrate relevant professional experience for academic units seeking separate accounting accreditation. This study examines student perceptions of the importance of relevant practical experience by using a two-phase method incorporating both a between-subjects design of an experiment and a survey in which participants ranked the importance of various faculty attributes. The results of the Phase One experiment indicate that professors possessing relevant practical experience were perceived by students to be of significantly higher quality than professors lacking relevant practical experience. Survey results in Phase Two, limited due to the method used, provide some degree of validation of the results found in Phase One.