Reviewed by Harold Q. Langenderfer University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The main thrust of this book is to help readers understand how current educational policy in accounting came about. An understanding of the opinions and philosophies of those organi-zations, committees, and individuals with past influence will provide perspectives on emerging directions in accounting edu-cational policy. The author provides readers with fascinating forward and backward movements in the development of ac-counting curricula as the rise in higher education in accounting and the rise of accounting as a profession evolve over a hundred year period from the 1880s to the 1980s. Five stages of growth in professional education occurred over the most recent half century, including (1) the apprenticeship stage, (2) the proprietary school stage, (3) the university stage, (4) the pre-professional stage, and (3) the post graduate stage. A key issue in the development of accounting education was the focus in the curriculum design. Some key issues included (1) how to cover large quantities of information in the limited time available, (2) how to cover the expanding body of knowledge, and (3) dealing with the social problems of extending pre-employment education, deterring earnings, the effects on personal and family life, and the required capital investment. In developing a viable accounting curriculum a number of vexing problems had to be reconciled. These key problems included (1) the relative importance of theory and skill, (2) the significant number of professional schools that would (a) either move too far in the direction of accounting theory, or (b) have an overemphasis on practice which limits ability to adapt to change, and (3) what is the role of liberal arts in professional education for accountants and business majors.

Chapter 1: The Beginning of Collegiate Accounting Education

A basic question that surfaced at the beginning of the de-bate over the need for higher education in accounting was whether higher education should have a practical orientation or a liberal arts orientation. Students who wanted more practical business training went to commercial schools which frequently evolved into separate schools for business training only. Accounting education, which started at the Wharton School in 1883, began as a conceptual accounting theory course that was designed to please the liberal arts faculty. To complicate this issue, the state of New York created the concept of a CPA certificate based on passing the CPA exam. As more states passed CPA laws, the attention of the faculty focused on students passing the CPA exam, which became a measure of teaching success. By 1931 accounting was the strongest field in business schools, but the tension between the theoretical and the practical approaches continued. As the accounting profession grew with the develop-ment of corporations and large scale production, management accounting was added to the collegiate curriculum as being in-dispensable to modern society and an important part of liberal arts education.

Chapter 2: Accounting Education in Early Post-War Years

A view developed that there was a need for highly trained accountants in companies just like the need for lawyers and engineers. This meant that a college education should have less emphasis on the CPA exam and more on management account-ing, budgeting, cost analysis, human relations and writing. For private company accountants to gain the ranks of management there was a need for orientation to management concerns and how to deal with them. Public accountants would also benefit from this broader curriculum focus as they began to serve as consultants and add services to their clients besides auditing financial statements. In effect, general agreement developed that there should be no substantial difference in training for private and public accountants! Published reports by the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation complained that the beginning accounting course had too much emphasis on mechanics and techniques and on public accounting compared with what was emphasized in management accounting. In essence, by the mid 1950s, there continued to be disagreement on such issues as (1) the need for a qualifying exam, (2) the need for a new accreditation process, (3) the extent of descriptive vocational material, and (4) the relative balance between public accounting and management accounting education.

Chapter 3: In the Wake of Foundation Reports

By 1957 the need for a balanced curriculum to educate all professional accountants led to an AAA Committee to define management accounting. In effect, cost accounting should evolve into management accounting. By 1961 the focus shifted to the need to get public accounting to be recognized as a learned profession which required more than four years of college plus practical training. The 1960s became a boom time for business in which the demand for accountants exceeded the supply, so CPA firms were forced to hire nonaccounting grads and train them. These developments shelved the concept of graduate education in accounting and resulted in a reduction in accounting hours in the curriculum.

Not only did boom times in business slow the push for a 5-year program, but so did the Vietnam War which increased the shortages of accountants available to CPA firms and forced accounting firms to hire more MBAs. In the process of hiring MBAs, a serious rift developed between practitioners and academicians. Some academicians resented the pressures which practitioners brought to bear on the academic community. The basic issue revolved around whether accounting was a social science or a profession. There appeared to be a compatibility of education and research, but not professional practice and research. The AAA reinforced the movement toward academic research in a 1954 report which stated that career accounting teachers should have doctoral degrees and research should be part of the requirements for promotion.

Chapter 4: The Professional School Movement

There was a general feeling in the accounting profession that the profession has always been beset by an inferiority complex and the developments in the 1960s aggravated the problem. Business education had little respect within the academic community and accounting had even less respect. Some in the accounting profession wanted to create separate professional schools of accounting to overcome the control of accounting by business administration and make accounting courses more relevant to the profession’s needs. There was a strong feeling that the accounting curriculum needed to be professionalized in order to reduce the confusion about what accounting is and to insure that teaching is placed ahead of a research atmosphere in which the “publish or perish” doctrine is too prevalent. From the public accounting view, there was much unhappiness with the direction of quantitative research. Many academicians also were dissatisfied with the direction of accounting education. The Accounting Review, for example, ignored the issues involved in the teaching of accounting. Researchers with no accounting experience were hired as educators at dominant schools, there was little interference with what they taught or researched, and they concentrated on intellectualism rather than professionalism.

In 1974 the AICPA created a Board on Standards for Pro-grams and Schools of Accounting to identify those standards that would justify a professional accounting curriculum for recognition by the profession. This was an implied accreditation approach which the AACSB did not want the profession to un-dertake. The Board of Standards issued a report in 1977 calling for a professional education that included postgraduate educa-tion. Deans of business schools objected to a separate school of accounting. On the other hand, accounting faculty felt they would be able to develop better courses, have more control over student quality, and have more funds to carry out their mission. Practitioners felt there would be more prestige and more practitioner input. In effect, the proposal for a separate school of accounting pitted Deans and non-accounting faculty against accounting faculty and practitioners. The conflict among the AICPA, AACSB, AAA, etc. was resolved unexpectedly when the AACSB announced in 1978 that it would start to accredit accounting programs. In effect, the AICPA was outflanked so as to hinder their move toward separate schools of accounting and the accreditation process remained in the hands of the Deans of business schools.

Chapter 5: The Battle for the Five-Year Requirement

Even though the ATCPA lost the battle for separate schools of accounting and failed in their accreditation efforts, they still held the licensure requirement for CPAs and wanted to push for state legislation that required five years of education to take the CPA exam. The AICPA recognized that the struggle to get the states to require the five-year program would not be easy. To expedite the five-year requirement, a committee was established to determine if the curriculum requirements previously estab-lished for a five-year program were still appropriate. This new “Albers” Committee agreed with the prior curriculum require-ments, but chose to refer to the five-year requirement as the “150-hour requirement” which would lead to a Master’s degree.

As might be expected there were some setbacks to these latest initiatives. Practitioners were not convinced that post graduation education was necessary. By 1993, 32 states had passed the 150-hour requirement, yet resistance began to build because of a negative view of the 150-hour requirement by practitioners who were concerned about education costs and the type of education being offered.

ADDENDUM AND CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

This book on the history of accounting education is comprehensive and intellectually stimulating. Most of the key initiatives to change and improve the development of accounting educa-tion have been identified and explained in detail. However, two developments over the years have been overlooked. An action taken by the AACSB in 1968 that affected a few schools probably should have been mentioned. In that year the AACSB issued a ruling that no major area in a business school should allow more than four courses beyond the core course, i.e., a total of 5 courses. This rule apparently allowed exceptions, such as for accounting, which in many states required up to eight courses to sit for the CPA exam. Many universities made an exception for the accounting majors. For whatever reason, the business school faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill did not grant the accounting area an exception.

Therefore, in order to continue to prepare students to sit for the CPA exam in North Carolina, the accounting area was forced to go to a 4 1/2 year program in 1968. In retrospect this turned out to be a blessing, although it did not seem that way at the time. By 1970 it was clear that the extra semester prepared the students better, they were more mature, and the CPA firms liked their improvement. Recognizing these benefits, the accounting faculty decided to go for another semester of education and give the students a master’s degree. This shift required the approval of the business school faculty and the university. It took six years for the formal appeal to be approved by the business school faculty and eight more years for university approval, a total of 14 years. A masters program was immediately installed in 1986 on a voluntary basis and operated for three years in that mode after which the program evolved into a complete five-year program with up to 120 graduates per year, up to half of whom are liberal arts undergraduates!

A second historical item not mentioned was the AAA Education Committee’s initiative to create a journal that would be an interface for faculty and practitioners. That journal, Accounting Horizons, along with Issues in Accounting Education were designed to overcome the major criticisms of the Accounting Review.

This reviewer is hopeful that readers will find this review of Van Wyhe’s book on accounting history to be a stimulus for reading the entire book. A fuller understanding of the forces contributing to the development of accounting education over a 50-year period should contribute a smoother transition and im-provements in accounting education in the future