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The Pathways Commission on Accounting Higher Education was created by the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to study the future structure of higher education for the accounting profession and develop recommendations for educational pathways to engage and retain the strongest possible community of students, academics, practitioners, and other knowledgeable leaders in the practice and study of accounting. This charge is, by design, expansive in its scope and open to much interpretation. Accordingly, the Commission began its work by developing a number of fundamental principles on which to focus its study, outreach, and the process used to make its recommendations. This introduction highlights some of those principles as a prelude to the summary of recommendations that follow.Pathways Commission participants, including leading accounting practitioners and educators, sought input from a variety of stakeholders over the last 18 months to investigate ways to enhance the opportunities and relevance of the accounting education experience in its broadest sense. This document serves solely as an executive summary of the much more comprehensive report of the Pathways Commission; we encourage readers to explore the full report.To achieve the Pathways Commission's charge, it was important to explore a wide range of perspectives on current and future challenges and opportunities for the profession. For instance, the amount and complexity of information accountants are charged with interpreting, processing, reviewing, and reporting is continuously increasing. While technological advances can surely enable a profession to better address change and meet new challenges, technological change offers a significant set of challenges to both curriculum development and effective learning environments. Economic pressures have always been part of the ebb and flow of challenges that can seem, at times, to be insurmountable obstacles to affecting real and lasting improvements for a profession. Certainly, the recommendations in this report arrive during a very difficult economic climate and are, thus, presented with even greater impediments to change than normal. These and other identified challenges helped to form a path of exploration for the Commission in its deliberations.At the beginning of this exploration, the Pathways Commission adopted a fundamental premise: the educational preparation of accountants should rest on a comprehensive and well-articulated vision of the role of accounting in the wider society. This vision of the role of the accounting profession, which is described more fully in the body of the Pathways Commission report, was instrumental in directing the work of the Commission to consider the profession in its broadest sense. Many individuals are engaged in the practice of accounting, filling a wide range of positions in the public, private, not-for-profit, and government sectors of our economy. The mix of formal education, training, experience, and certification needed differs across these roles. Further, certain functions are regulated by state and federal laws. The development of useful business information, preparation, and attestation to informative financial information and the production of reliable data for management decision-making require that those involved in the information chain have an education commensurate with the challenges and responsibilities inherent in their work.Many readers of this summary and the full report, particularly those in the academic community, will recognize some challenges, impediments, and recommendations that have been discussed in previous studies on the future of accounting education. Recognition of this fact by the sponsoring organizations and the Commissioners at the outset of this undertaking led to the focus in the report on identifying impediments to change and the need for a more focused, continuous approach to affecting change in the profession. Thus, the final recommendation is not directed toward a specific area to be enhanced or changed in the academic or practice communities. Rather, it focuses on establishing an ongoing process to implement these or future recommendations and putting in place the structures and relationships needed to overcome the limitations of periodic efforts to sustain the vitality of accounting education and practice. Studies in the past have surfaced effective ideas and innovations, and incremental changes have been made over time as interested parties have led individual efforts to enhance accounting education. With our history foremost in mind, the Pathways Commission recommendations place significant emphasis on the need for a sustained focus on the many areas that impact accounting education and creating approaches that foster that continuous process.The paragraphs above provide a brief glimpse into the thought process and activities that were a part of this effort. The following is a very condensed description of the significant views and recommendations directed at both accounting education and the practice communities offered by the Commission. Each recommendation summarized below is followed by one or more objectives that are intended to provide additional guidance toward accomplishing the focus of the recommendation. Chapter 3 provides the reader with more detailed context for the recommendations and objectives, and Chapter 4 offers detailed actions to implement those recommendations or overcome identified impediments. Accordingly, in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of each recommendation and suggested implementation actions, readers are encouraged to consider the entirety of the report.All too frequently, students in accounting classes are exposed to technical material in a vocation-focused way that is disembodied from the complex, real-world settings to which the students are bound and from the insights that research can bring to practice. In addition, unlike in other professions, accounting practitioners are not significant consumers of academic accounting research. There are many reasons for this; for example, most accountants are not educated in universities on how to read and understand academic research, accounting researchers have difficulty getting access to requisite data to address current problems facing the business community, and academic research is often not directed toward addressing the issues most pressing to the profession. This lack of collaboration is not typical of other learned professions in the university, such as medicine, engineering, or law, where more research is clinical—deliberately directed toward problems faced by practicing professionals. To better address the gap in linkages between research and practice, practice and education, and education and research, objectives for action items to address this recommendation include the following:The critical shortage of tenure-track faculty in accounting is well documented, especially in the audit, systems, and tax specialties. This shortage is having significant immediate and long-term impacts on both the quality and viability of accounting education and accounting research (e.g., reduced capacity to educate doctoral students, reduced research capacity, reduced terminally prepared faculty teaching masters and undergraduate students, and ultimately fewer faculty members in the future). A combination of circumstances—the shortage of accounting faculty that is likely to increase sharply (given the average age of current full-time tenured faculty) and a single pathway to a single terminal degree in accounting that cannot accommodate substantially more doctoral students—raises questions about how accounting educators will be able to fulfill their roles in teaching, research, and service in the future.Going forward, flexibility and exploration of new pathways will be essential to maintaining the relevance and delivery of a quality accounting education and to sustaining vital accounting research.Objectives aimed at addressing these conditions include the following:Formal and informal reward structures have evolved, too often, to advantage the work and accomplishments of research over those of teaching. Because accounting educators do their work in settings wherein maintaining their roles in teaching, research, and service are increasingly complex, addressing the imbalance of focus on research compared to teaching is not a simple task. Growing competition for resources at the institutional, college, and program levels and a number of pressures coming to bear on accounting programs are likely to continue to increase. Still, these impediments to addressing this issue need to be overcome. Creating effective learning experiences is a vital part of accounting educators' work, critical to achieving the values of a learned profession, and should be part of the peer-review process, faculty-development plans, reward systems, and other recognitions and incentives. Objectives to meet this recommendation include the following:The practice of accounting is changing rapidly. Its geographic reach is global, and technology plays an increasingly prominent role. A new generation of students has arrived who are more at home with technology and less patient with traditional teaching methods. All of this is occurring while many accounting programs and requirements have remained constant, and accounting curricula have evolved with limited commitment or agreement about the core learning objectives. Vital programs, courses, and approaches require systematic attention to curriculum, pedagogy, and opportunities for renewal. Specific objectives to accomplish this recommendation include the following:Many students beginning in accounting gain the impression that it is a narrow vocational field, and professional practice is almost exclusively about auditing or taxation. The result is too many high-quality students who might otherwise be interested in pursuing accounting are not attracted to it. Promoting the utility of accounting to the broader society and, moreover, ensuring diversity among those who enter the profession is critical. These conditions suggest the following objectives for implementation actions:Available information about currently employed accounting professionals and future demand for them can be difficult to obtain. Recent advances in the coverage and accessibility of national data on employment and the ability to link these data to higher-education databases are starting to alleviate this condition. Pathways are also opening for gathering data on future demand. Similar attention is needed to understand supply-and-demand conditions for accounting faculty as well.Objectives to be accomplished include the following:For many decades, gifted and dedicated colleagues in the academic and practice communities have identified and wrestled with challenges in educating accountants for the profession. While previous studies have resulted in some successful new directions and promising innovations, most past efforts at renewal have lacked an explicit implementation strategy and structure to move their recommendations forward on a systematic and properly resourced basis. To address this need, the Commission's last recommendation is to establish an implementation process that will bring together a broad group of stakeholders in a manner that encourages further consideration and implementation of the recommendations and suggested action items put forth in this report.Past efforts to review and renew accounting education have made significant contributions and surfaced effective innovations. However, previous efforts have not systematically identified and addressed the major environmentally induced impediments that inhibit continuing renewal. Pockets of innovation exist that are supported by passionate individuals, but many are frustrated by the difficulties of maintaining that focus, and others work in environments wherein their interest in that work is stifled.Impediments exist at institutional, program/department, and individual levels. Among the most significant impediments are (1) failure to acknowledge what drives faculty to change, (2) inability to overcome the silo effect in many departments in which curricula are viewed simply as collections of independent courses, (3) delays in incorporating effective practices in pedagogy because faculty lack experience, knowledge, and development opportunities, (4) the slow pace at which curricular change occurs within colleges and universities, (5) lack of flexibility in tenure processes and post-tenure review focused primarily on research productivity, (6) lack of reward structures promoting student-centeredness and curricular innovation, (7) inability or unwillingness of deans and department chairs to implement change, and (8) lack of appreciation or understanding of the importance of sound pedagogy and professional relevance. Without the commitment of accounting educators and practice colleagues to challenge the institutional cultures and structures at the root of these impediments, sustaining renewal and innovation in accounting education will continue to be limited. The Commission recommends actions to address these impediments, outlined in more detail in the full report.The Commission's seven recommendations are situated within a complex web of interrelated challenges that are described in the full report. It is important to note that many recommendations address multiple challenges. Furthermore, the recommendations themselves are interdependent. Elements of a given recommendation—for example, the need for approaching these challenges with a common identity for the discipline of accounting or the demand for educational experiences that transcend technical knowledge—occur in more than one place. This interdependence means the recommendations should not be pursued independently. Progress will have to be made on many of these recommendations, and additional recommendations yet to be identified, for accounting education and the accounting profession to meet and exceed the challenges of the future.As with any undertaking of this kind, there will be views and recommendations in this report that will resonate with many interested persons in the accounting education and practice communities. In turn, there will be some views and recommendations that spark negative responses and spirited debate among some readers. Whether one agrees or disagrees with one or more of the recommendations or whether the impediments can seem insurmountable at times, it is the hope of the Pathways Commission that its process and outcome will begin a healthy debate and closer self-examination of the ways in which the academic and practice communities can forge new pathways to an enhanced accounting profession for the future. Doing nothing because change may seem too difficult or dismissing a recommendation because it is not worded or focused exactly right should not be an acceptable response.As implementation activities around these recommendations begin, we welcome your comments and suggestions at http://www.pathwayscommission.org.
Behn et al. (Wed,) studied this question.