As I mentioned on the call on Wed., I’m a grad student at UIUC, in their accountancy program. I love it. It is just challenging enough to be interesting without being overwhelming.
I want to teach accounting at the undergraduate level. Evidently, there is a shortage of accounting instructors, and many colleges have full time positions that don’t require a Ph.D. I’ve seen perhaps 3-4 job postings that only require a bachelors in accounting. I’ve seen a few that are tenure track, and the minimum education to apply was a masters. Of course, the top universities still want a Ph.D., but community colleges and smaller colleges are advertising jobs and only require a masters to apply.
Anyway, I have some general ideas about accounting education at the undergraduate level and I’d like to see if they are correct. In short, I suspect that it is overly complicated. I’ve talked to a number of people who really struggled with the introductory accounting courses (intro to fin acct and intro to managerial acct), and they generally seem to be smart people with good GPAs. They really wanted to get it, but for whatever reason they couldn’t. It is true that some of the foundational concepts are counterintuitive (debits, credits, COA, B/S, I/S), but there is nothing ad hoc about them. They are a unified, cohesive whole. Remove one and the rest collapse. Also, I still have my text book for the intro courses, and it does seem overly complex. I wonder if there is an incentive for textbook authors to add words to increase the word count? Not sure but it does seem that way. There are many instances in my current textbooks where I think, “That could have been simplified with a flow chart or diagram.” I also notice that there is quite a bit of material in these books that NEVER gets used. Case studies, for example.
I also think that levity would help. It would be easy to include cultural references to accounting once in a while, such as movie clips, book references, and accounting cartoons. This would lighten the presentation and might add a bit of light-hearted deprecation–poking fun at ourselves, so to speak. For example (source):
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What do you think? Did you ever take the intro sequence for accounting (typically, ACCT 101 and 102, Intro to Financial Accounting and Intro to Managerial Accounting)? What did you think about it?
As a part of my practice, I often find Business Owners do not pay attention to their financial reports as they have been mystified by their accountants.
I tend to spend a great deal of time reconstructing them to show the flow of funds in and out in a straightforward manner.
In small business , cash is everything and most accountants are trained for large companies which have the benefit of inertia and scale, where accruals make far more sense.
Cutting to the essence of what needs to be understood and tracked by a business owner takes a bit of understanding the business model.
-Knowing how to split revenue into relevant segments is key and often done poorly.
-Not knowing cash breakeven points can be deadly
-Not presenting metrics that relate to actionable information is why reports are not read.