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EDUCATION
By making it easier for practitioners to obtain doctorates, nontraditional doctoral programs may help stem the accounting faculty shortage.
The shortage of accounting faculty in the United States has been a serious concern for academicians, policymakers, and the profession for decades. One solution to the problem may be convincing more practitioners to become faculty members, and, indeed, a significant number of practitioners are interested in teaching. Though certain barriers, such as the time commitment required to earn a doctorate, have kept many practitioners from joining the ranks of the faculty, recent developments have opened new pathways for practicing accountants to enter academia. One of these is the development of flexible practitioner-oriented doctoral programs that enable practitioners to study part time while still earning a salary.
THE FACULTY SHORTAGE AND WHY PRACTITIONERS MAY BE THE ANSWER
In the 2013-14 school year, a record 207,071 undergraduates enrolled in accounting programs- over 73,000 more than enrolled in 2001-02. Across all programs, according to an annual supply-anddemand survey by the AICPA, enrollments have risen every year from 1999-2000 to the present (see 2015 Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits, available at tinyurl.com/q28aomd). Yet enrollments in accounting Ph.D. programs have not increased much over the past six years, leading to a shortage of full-time faculty.
The accounting profession has taken steps to address the faculty shortage, among them launching the Accounting Doctoral Scholars (ADS) Program in 2008. Over 120 sponsors donated $17 million to this program, which was intended to incrementally increase the Ph.D. pipeline. To date, 108 current and future ADS Ph.D.s have made the transition from practice to academia. The AICPA Foundation will begin a new doctoral initiative in 2016.
The shortage persists, however, and it has forced close to two-thirds of all accounting departments to increase undergraduate class sizes in the past five years, a recent survey of 204 accounting program administrators found. According to the survey, which was conducted by accounting professors R. David Plumlee and Philip M.J. Reckers, 39% of small and 30% of large accredited schools have had to reduce the number of electives they offer. Plumlee and Reckers also found that more than 70% of administrators said their programs had been harmed by...