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Career Neutral Accting Curriculum

Professor Cathy Scott at Navarro brought this article in Strategic Finance  to my attention. Those innovators at Kansas State have adopted a program for accounting that is not so focused on producing CPAs for external financial reporting and audit. Instead the graduate program offers different tracks reflecting that in deed there are different career paths within accounting.  Please read this one and let me know what you think.

I logged onto the K State Acct Site expecting to see them make a big to do about this.  They did not so I e mailed and expressed surprise. To my surprise they replied and sent the memo to the Dept Chair who is apparently going to implement just such remarks on their site.

DLE

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3 responses to “Career Neutral Accting Curriculum”

  1. Guadalupe B Avatar
    Guadalupe B

    I agree with the need to influence more accounting majors to pursue graduate work because there is a greater need for specialization within this field. This is especially more true in our world today because of the increasing competition from other countries such as India and China. Our world is truelly becoming “flat” and in order for us to be competative and marketable we need to strive for that increased knowledge in specialization.

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  2. Kimi Pope Avatar
    Kimi Pope

    I am impressed with the strategy Kansas State adopted for their accounting curriculum. Although I do intend to concentrate in internal audit, I know there are other students out there who plan to go a different path with accounting. Many non-accounting students do not realize the number of jobs out there for accounting majors. Forensic accounting is a very hot field right now and it would not be a boring job like most people think accountants have. I think UNT does a good job about educating the accounting majors on other career paths other than tax and audit. I believe our 5 year program offer 5 different concentrations. I took Information Systems at UNT in the fall and that course was extremely helpful in applying concepts I learned in Intermediate I. I think something else that would be helpful to Inter. students is to make basic Finance a pre-req for upper level accounting courses. I mean how can you be expected to account for bonds and stocks without really understanding them completely. Another class I think should be focused on more heavily in the undergraduate and graduate level is ethics in accounting. I had read an article in an accounting journal that reported that ethics is the least common research topic for accounting students.

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  3. Dennis Elam Avatar
    Dennis Elam

    Indeed, I e mailed K State and the Chair responded that they would be putting more information up about their program. I quite agree about the finance pre req. I have an extensive background in trading fixed income securities (bonds) and will be trying to better equip all of you in this area. I quite agree that is the problem for most students, the lack of understanding just what preferred stock or bond is and does. We will also have several case problems on ethics as well as papers in class. A great post, thakns Kimi!

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