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The future of the accounting profession depends on the ability of accounting education to produce graduates who possess a broad array of skills and knowledge. The Bedford Commission [American Accounting Association, 1986] argued that accounting education is failing to meet the needs of the profession since the focus of accounting curriculum continues to be on the memorization of rules rather than on the development of conceptual and analytical skills. A similar theme was advanced by the profession itself in its white paper entitled Perspectives on Education: Capabilities for Success in the Accounting Profession. As an outgrowth of these concerns, the Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) was formed in 1988 to coordinate and stimulate change in the way accounting is taught. The AECC has proposed that an essential objective of accounting education should be to provide accounting graduates with both general knowledge and organizational and business knowledge.
In order to produce graduates with the desired skills and capabilities, accounting education must also focus on attracting and retaining top-quality students to accounting as an academic major. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to identify the beliefs and factors that influence students' choice of an academic major. The primary objective of this study is to identify and analyze the beliefs that affect the choice of academic major. The beliefs of students who have chosen or intend to choose accounting as a major will be compared with the beliefs of students who have chosen or intend to choose a business major other than accounting. Unlike prior studies which have examined the choice of academic major within a survey framework [see e.g., Paolillo and Estes, 1982; Bosworth and Ford, 1985; Gul et al., 1989; Fein and Kryztofik, 1991], this study will rely on a social psychological model to provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the choice of major decision. The model, known as the theory of planned behavior [Ajzen, 1985; 1987; 1988], hypothesizes that the intention to perform a behavior is influenced by personal evaluations about the effects of performing the target behavior, the perceived social pressures related to performing the behavior, and the decision maker's perceived control over the performance of the behavior. Unlike studies that have used ad hoc surveys to elicit opinions, the use of a...