Exploring The Gap in Accounting Education: A Study for Call to Action

Abstract

In today's global market, a change is seen everywhere of more focused system which gives accurate and contemporary results. Accounting education is not untouched with this condition. But, from the view point of accounting practitioner and students, there is a gap generated in the current era between the accounting syllabus and real world requirements because of this changeover. Accounting education is now at crossroads. Number of qualitative students electing accounting subject in their course is decreasing rapidly. Students do not perceive an accounting degree to be as valuable as it used to be or as valuable as other business degrees. Accounting education, as currently structured is outdated, broken and needs to be modified significantly. These are some issues which tried to raise in this paper. This paper especially concentrates to identify gap in accounting education. For this purpose a survey has been made to 50 students of four renowned universities of Rajasthan. The implications of the results are that accounting academics cannot ignore the teaching of traditional accounting techniques and may need to increase the coverage of the issues involved in implementing contemporary management accounting techniques. Taken together these points indicate a need for major changes in our perception, policy and practice of our accounting education performance. For creating an appropriate measure to this study, SWOT Analysis has been done. It shows wide range of career with high salary, familiarity with business world, etc. as strengths, lack of qualitative educator, lack of updated syllabus and irregularity of students in classes as weakness, strong career chances, skilled for business world, familiarity with new technology as opportunities and continuously changing era of accounting, backward looking perception for accounting, less rewarding than other professions are threats of accounting education.

Finally, this paper effort to bridging the gap between challenges and solutions of accounting education with its real world requirement and make it more relevant.