Having One's Cake and Eating it Too? Exploring the Balance between Research and Teaching for Accounting Education

• In Event: Accounting Education

Abstract

One of higher education’s most enduring and perplexing questions is the nexus between research and teaching outcomes. The prevailing belief is that teaching and research are symbiotic activities, with each enhancing and informing the other. However, research conducted over several decades and across many discipline has failed to support this relationship empirically. This paper revisits this question for the U.S. accounting discipline, arguing that resolution is now particularly important. We uniquely elevate the analysis of scholarship to the departmental level and displace teaching altogether, instead using CPA exam pass rates as higher education’s summative educational achievement. We find that overall research achievement associating positively with student CPA exam success. Examining 1985-2016 data for 69 top programs finds that while our 69 elite programs maintained both strong faculty research productivity (across three levels of journals) and student CPA pass rates, this result changed somewhat, in 2005, when the AICPA required students to take each CPA exam part separately, and complete all four parts successfully in an 18-month period. Such elite accounting programs can thus maintain both high level faculty scholarship and their students’ professional success.
We also discuss the implications of these findings, including extending these results to non-elite accounting programs.

Authors

• Timothy J Fogarty, Case Western Reserve University

• Alan Reinstein, Wayne State University

• Mary Sasmaz, Case Western Reserve University