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In recent years the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), along with professional accounting organizations in many other countries, has become increasingly concerned that public accounting is losing its appeal to bright business students. Some "insiders" suggest that the profession is not reaching students early enough in the educational process, and that many students have a poor image of public accounting as entailing dull work, heavy demands, and low starting salaries [Luscombe, 1988, 1989].
Professional surveys conducted in Canada and the United States seem to confirm this trend. A CICA task force set up in 1988 to study the attractiveness of the profession concluded that public accounting was seeing an erosion in its ability to attract the best candidates. Inman et al. [1989] provide an analysis of professional and college surveys regarding the quality and quantity of accounting students in the United States. A comparison of annual reports published by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants indicates that the number of accounting graduates available for entry-level positions in public accounting declined more than one-third between 1977 and 1987 [MacNeill and Sanders, 1978; McInnes and Sanders, 1988]. Data published by The Cooperative Institutional Research Program in the United States indicates that the percentage of business majors planning to concentrate in accounting declined 23 percent between 1977 and 1986 [Astin et al., 1977, 1986]. Furthermore, Inman et al. [1989] report that accounting students at both the freshman and fourth-year level had lower average SAT scores than other business or liberal arts/social sciences majors. These trends must be of major concern to accounting educators, who share a common interest with practitioners in their desire to attract and retain high calibre students in accounting programs.
This study investigates factors that may influence business students to select or reject a career as a chartered accountant (CA). It differs from previous research, which has tended to focus on criteria determining the accountant's career choice, without comparison to other business students' choices. Specifically, this study employs both univariate analysis and a multi-discriminant model to examine whether the decision of business majors to choose chartered accountancy is correlated with: (1) the importance that the student attaches to intrinsic rewards, financial remuneration, and job market factors in selecting a career; (2) the student's...