Let’s go back to learning from first principles and teach reasoning/judgement.. I taught at university several years ago. The students just wanted to know THE answer.

I had arguments with college students to whom I gave a “C” – they got “A”" in high school where it was “Monkey see, monkey do”"! The students were also incapable of expressing themselves. I had the nerve to challenge their English skills!

It’s quite scary that accountants that cannot “do accounting anymore” are converting to IFRS in Canada. We have to get through it somehow.

Good debate here on this blog and interesting

And then when I became a little adjunct professor, I realized even more how little I knew when I came out of college. Having to teach Accounting 101 brought it all home for me… I wanted my students to know the why behind it. That with some basic foundational knowledge, they could literally figure out the debits and credits for any problem that was thrown at them.

They didn’t buy it. It was easier to memorize certain journal entries they knew they’d be tested on. *sigh*

This is a good article about how the academic side of accounting is in dire need of professors:

http://www.sequence-inc.com/index.php?view=article&id=77%3Avanishing-profession&option=com_content&Itemid=22

I say they need to start looking at wholesale reform of accounting education in the U.S.

When these tenure addicts junked the old “practice set” because they had this pea-brained idea that students could inhale what used to be a two-semester course in one semester–so the tenured class wouldn’t have to dirty their hands teaching accounting mechanics and basic–the demolition of accountants began. My stepson graduated with a high GPA from the College of William and Mary, passed the CPA exam, and couldn’t make an accounting entry if his life depended on it. He told me that the W&M profs told him that, when it came to entries, “The computer would do it.” This is not a one-time phenomenon. One of our best clients called me five years ago and said, “How come CPAs can’t do accounting any more?” (This man, the CEO of a $100 million company got his undergraduate degree in accounting and was a financial professional for 35 years before moving into general management.)

In the revised accounting curriculum, students will actually have to learn finance, the CAPM, valuation, and strategic management because the CPA exam will TEST them on it. My, my. They might even pick up a little tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Alleleuia.

That should be hilarious, if only because the spectacle will make the U.S. Postal (Dis)Service look like a well-oiled machine. I can’t wait. And before all of the debits-and-credits crazies reading this get their slingshots out, I should tell you that I’m a CPA, CMA, and former CFO who knows whereof he speaks. So chill out.

I think that the lack of real world experience by accounting professors can be handled with two solutions:

1. Require professors to do “internships” in public accounting, either during summer breaks or on sabbatical.
2. Get working CPAs into more classrooms as adjunct faculty. (I know that the current model favors tenured, full-time professors. I say this does a disservice to students.)

How does one inject real world into the academic community anyway? With tenure they just stay there? Should we require our accounting professors to take a sabbatical and work in the real world?

I am on the Board of the Research Foundation of the FEI in Canada. We are trying to build bridges to the academic community.

I do not think we should give up. Right now companies are converting to IFRS in Canada. Do we ask all to have been through a conversion already before doing a conversion here? In the EU they had to do it without the benefi of experienced people for the most part.

It’s difficult I think we are creative enogh to come up with solutions for IFRS implementation. It will not be easy though I agree.

At the recent FASB Forum on potential IFRS adoption in the USA there was a great deal of discussion on the problems of teaching IFRS in universities. This was reported in the CFO Magazine
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/11566491/c_2984368/?f=archives
The dwindling number of professors in US Universities was noted as well as their average age – 56.

This is my blog

http://ifrscanadadevilisinthedetails.blogspot.com/

It is too pessimistic to believe that professors will not be able to teach IFRS – are they so rule bound that they are totally unable to go back to first principles? If so there is a bigger problem. Incidentally we have the same problem in Cnada where the conversion date is 2011.