The accounting curriculum in higher education: A study in educational polic

In order to lay the proper groundwork for a policy study of curriculum in higher education for accounting, the history of higher education in accounting is investigated. There is a focus upon the issue of curriculum.;In the early years of higher education for accounting, many of the central policy issues arose. There was a struggle to determine the proper relationship between accounting and the liberal arts. There was an effort to determine the balance between conceptual and procedural teaching. There were efforts to determine how much higher education was required.;In the early post-world-war-two period, accounting education reformulated the issue of conceptual versus procedural pedagogy in terms of managerial versus financial accounting. Public accounting, which had been identified with the procedural area of financial accounting, attempted to restore its prestige by including within itself the area of managerial accounting and by convincing academics that public accounting required a postbaccalaureate level of education.;In the wake of the Foundation Reports of 1959, the prestige of accounting education fell. Accounting academics countered by establishing their prestige through esoteric quantitative research, while public accounting responded by pressing harder for a postbaccalaureate requirement. Pedagogy was increasingly ignored.;In the 1970s public accounting attempted to restore its prestige by using the separate school of accountancy movement and the related accreditation movement, both of which focused on teacher qualifications. It was unsuccessful, so it turned increasingly in the 1980s to an attempt to pass state laws requiring postbaccalaureate education for public accounting.;The history reveals the essential policy questions. What is accounting? What is the relationship of accounting to both the liberal arts and to general business? How should accounting best be taught? How long should accounting education take? Numerous subsidiary questions are involved in each of these questions. The practical question of how to improve accounting education does not, based on an historical perspective, seem to have an encouraging answer.