December 2000

Educators Receive Call for Change at AICPA Annual Conference

The 250 accounting educators attending the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) Accounting Educators Conference on Nov. 3–4 in Atlanta received a double-barreled call for change.

First, 1999–2000 AICPA Chair Robert Elliott addressed the critical need for the accounting profession to move to higher-level activities in the information value chain and to broader, more integrated services.

Elliott then explained the concept behind Cognitor, the new international professional designation being developed by a multinational task force represented in the United States by the AICPA.

Steve Albrecht, coauthor of Accounting Education: Charting the Course Through a Perilous Future, outlined serious problems faced by accounting education: declining demand, lack of interest among high school students, and outdated instruction. The full text of this provocative new report, a joint project of the American Accounting Association (AAA), AICPA, Institute of Management Accountants, and Big Five, can be found on the AAA website, www.aaahq.org.

Albrecht also reported on the AICPA’s Taylor Report, which found that many CPAs would not again choose a bachelor’s in accounting as their main educational path to the profession.

These themes dominated the remainder of the conference, which included discussion of the use of the AICPA Core Competency Framework for program assessment, issues in technology-enabled instruction, and an update on the future of the CPA examination. In addition, six new cases in the areas of e-commerce, risk analysis, strategic decision analysis, and activity-based costing in government were presented as part of the professor-practitioner series. As always, the cases were excellent and suitable for use in the classroom.

At the end of the conference, the AICPA announced that it was discontinuing the conference to devote more resources to high school-level recruiting. The news was not well received by some attendees, many of whom view the AICPA Educators Conference as their main conference activity each year.