Can Accounting Innovate?

Is your accounting curriculum stuck in the past? And is your enrollment of accounting students declining because of it? 

This was the situation I encountered when I joined the School of Accountancy at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business as director in July 2022. In many ways, our positioning was strong. We had a talented, engaged, and committed accountancy faculty, and had supplemented our traditional, CPA-based curriculum with analytics. We had structured our Master of Professional Accountancy (MPA) to prepare students for the CPA. All the pieces were in place, but the students were not coming. Relative to a decade earlier, the School of Accountancy had lost 40 percent of its undergraduate majors and more than two-thirds of its master’s students.

Georgia State’s accounting program is not alone in facing declining enrollment. According to the AICPA, combined undergraduate and graduate accounting degree completion peaked in 2018, then fell 18 percent by 2022. Similarly, CPA completion plunged by 32 percent from 2016 to 2022. The declining pipeline of accountants was recognized, even as demand in the profession increased. 

Decreased interest and enrollment in accounting programs has coincided with two other significant disruptions in the field. First, the traditional partnership structure of accounting firms is under threat from alternative sources of capital, including employee ownership (ESOP) and private equity, which has led to consolidation and considerable speculation about the field’s future labor structure and business model. Second, new technologies are rapidly transforming the processes and work of public and private accounting roles. These technologies include analytics and data analysis techniques, increased computing power (e.g., cloud computing), blockchain, and most recently and dramatically, generative artificial intelligence. 

Changes in accounting’s longtime industrial organization and use of technology, combined with other factors, such as changes in the premium placed on work-life balance, have formed perfect storm conditions for the discipline. Although accounting had been one of the most popular, sought-after majors in business schools, even top programs are struggling to attract students today.

1. 2023 AICPA Trends Report: https://www.thiswaytocpa.com/segmented-landing/trends-report/
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/accountants-and-auditors.htm

Despite this upheaval, our School of Accountancy had been reluctant to change its curriculum in meaningful ways. The traditional role of accounting programs has been to teach students technical skills to prepare them for CPA licensure and careers in public accounting. Accounting practice evolves slowly, and the CPA exam had changed very little. 

To break free of this rigid and outdated structure and transform our program to respond and adapt to these changing dynamics, we asked ourselves some difficult questions. What does an accounting program exist to do today, and how can we best prepare our students for successful careers? These are existential questions for an academic accounting department, and there are no easy answers.

The School of Accountancy embarked on an extensive strategic planning process, interviewing more than 80 external stakeholders, including recruiters, partners, and office leaders. 

We learned that although the CPA remains an important and valuable designation for graduates, employers also want new hires to possess skills beyond technical accounting, with data analysis know-how and acumen in rapidly evolving disruptive technologies mentioned most frequently. Firms feel ill-equipped to effectively deploy and use artificial intelligence, even though they are aware that generative AI has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of accounting by enhancing the processes and, ultimately, work product of accountants.

Interviewees enthusiastically agreed that graduates with a foundation of technical accounting skills supplemented with significant ability in data analysis, new technologies, and generative AI would be ideal new hires. Moreover, companies are not only looking for staff who can just work with analytics and emerging data techniques; they also are seeking leaders who can help their firms transition to this exciting new data-driven age.

This presented an interesting challenge for us as accounting professors. For years, our focus was on technical accounting; this is what we do, we told ourselves, other things are not accounting. The first step, then, was shifting our thinking about our job as Georgia State’s School of Accountancy. Is it to teach technical accounting? Or is it to prepare our graduates for the accounting careers of today (and tomorrow), even if that widens the scope of what we do?

We opted for the latter. Our newest master’s program Master’s in Interdisciplinary Studies— will be half accounting and half data science, with a capstone course synthesizing insights learned from the two disciplines. Although this degree will not provide the same depth of technical accounting that our traditional, CPA-oriented MPA provides, graduates of our accounting/data science master’s program will have sufficient accounting credits to qualify for CPA licensure along with more extensive data science experience than most accounting master’s graduates. Based on the feedback we have received from our partners in accounting and industry, we believe graduates from this program will be uniquely well-equipped to succeed in the accounting field today and to lead change into the future.

3. The educational requirements for CPA Licensure in Georgia are 150 total credit hours and 30 credit hours of accounting beyond introductory level courses.

Peter Demerjian, Director of the School of Accountancy, J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University

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