Has the Quality of Accounting Education Declined?

Paul E. Madsen

60 citations0/0 files storedThe Accounting Review

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Accounting Education and Careers Auditing, Earnings Management, Governance Management and Marketing Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT For decades, prominent members of the accounting community have argued that the quality of accounting education is falling. Support for this claim is limited because of a scarcity of data characterizing the constructs of interest. This study is a comparative evaluation of the quality of accounting education from the 1970s to the 2000s using unique data to quantify education quality for accounting and many comparison disciplines. I find that, compared to most other types of college education, accounting education quality has been steady or increasing over the sample period. However, relative to other business degree programs, the evidence is mixed. The quality of students self-selecting non-accounting business degrees has increased while the quality of accounting students has not. The disparity in student quality is not reflected in the pay received by accounting graduates, which has remained stable relative to the pay received by graduates with other business degrees, although this result is likely influenced by regulatory changes during the 2000s, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Together, the evidence suggests that the quality of accounting education has not declined rapidly over the last four decades, but in the competition among business degree programs for high-quality students, accounting has underperformed. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available in the Freshman and Senior Surveys of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles; the IPUMS-USA database, which is compiled and distributed by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota; the National Survey of College Graduates, which is available from the National Science Foundation; and the General Social Survey, which is maintained by the National Opinion Research Center at The University of Chicago.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.

References

2011Thinking, Fast and Slow 1964Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education 2010Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books 2004Returns to investment in education: a further update 2001Estimating the Return to Schooling: Progress on Some Persistent Econometric Problems 2002Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update 2003Ability sorting and the returns to college major 1999Does It Pay to Attend an Elite Private College? Cross-Cohort Evidence on the Effects of College Type on Earnings

Cited by

2017Students’ perceptions of their first accounting class: implications for instructors 2022Digital Transformation in Romanian Accounting Practice and Education: Impact and Perspectives 2017Margin of safety: Life history strategies and the effects of socioeconomic status on self-selection into accounting 2015Is There A Scientific Basis for Accounting? Implications for Practice, Research, and Education 2022Social cognitive career theory and rural high school learners’ intentions to pursue an accounting career

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.