Graduate and undergraduate accounting programs at N.C. State are receiving national attention after being ranked in the top 25 of the Public Accounting Report’s 2005 Professor Survey.
The survey, conducted annually, obtains feedback from accounting professors and department heads from all over the nation regarding the programs that turn out students capable of some day reaching the status of partner in a firm.
“This is a ranking done by your peer group, rather than by the profession itself,” College of Management Dean Ira Weiss said. “There is a focus on which programs really prepare students to become partners in large international accounting firms.”
The report ranked the undergraduate accounting program at 24, a tie with Florida State and Baylor University. The Master’s of Accounting program rang in one peg higher at 23 along with Wake Forest.
Weiss called the recognition to the MAC program, which began in 1994, “great kudos to a relatively young program.”
According to Weiss, one of the reasons the accounting programs ranked so high was the education students receive, which he pointed out is “somewhat unique.” Students at the graduate level, for example, receive a heavy emphasis on information technology as a regular part of the curriculum.
“We’re putting out students who are not only well grounded in the fundamentals of accounting, but also well grounded in the processes and technologies that are highly coupled with accounting,” Weiss said. “They are somewhat better rounded students than what might be coming out of a typical program.”
One of the premier faculty members in the accounting department, Assistant Professor Marianne Bradford specializes in one of these technology-rich areas called enterprise resource planning, which deals with the common software that firms and businesses use to manipulate data. Specifically, Bradford teaches students “how financial information flows throughout these systems.”
“Students — when they get out — are going to see these systems in the companies they audit and they are going to understand how they work and how they are controlled,” Bradford said.
The rankings also speak to the quality of the faculty, Weiss said.
“They don’t always know our programs that well, but what they really know is our faculty,” Weiss said. “If you have high-quality faculty doing high-quality things, then probably your program is really on the cutting edge.”
And it’s that recognition, Bradford said, that makes it exciting to be on the list with other schools.
“It’s not just that [other] professors know professors here, it’s that people in the business world do,” Bradford said.
The benefits of PAR’s survey don’t stop with the faculty. The rankings also effect the accounting students, like Amy Stafford.
As president of Beta Alpha Psi, an honorary organization for students and professionals in the field of financial information, Stafford said she decided to pursue her master’s in accounting at the University after earning her bachelor’s.
She stayed, she said, because she already knew most of the professors and preferred to remain with the “very elite faculty” offered in the program. This degree of quality, she said, creates implications beyond the classroom.
“Because of that [quality], it helps to make sure graduates are on top of the whole pile of people coming out of [other] accounting programs,” Bradford said.
According to Accounting Department Head Frank Buckless, the ranking is “just a starting point” for the fledgling program.
“We’ve only been around for about 30 years,” he said. “That’s relatively young in the world of accounting.”
He pointed out that because the survey is “totally based on perceptions of quality,” people in the accounting world are beginning to notice the performance of the program. And with a more than 90 percent job placement rate among master’s students, Buckless said that recognition may become “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“We’ve been up to this point a well-kept secret,” he said. “We’re starting to do a better job about letting the world know what we do here.”