It was 1921—the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. The Great War was over, an energetic modern culture was blossoming, and a prosperous economy was driving growth in the business sector. In response, Brigham Young University created the Department of Accounting and Business Administration. Before that, students could take accounting courses, but now they could actually obtain a bachelor’s degree in the profession.
That was 100 years ago—and it was only the beginning. This response to changes in the business world became a model that has driven faculty and administrators at what is now the School of Accountancy (SOA) at the BYU Marriott School of Business to reenvision, innovate, and, with time, develop one of the nation’s top-tier accounting programs.
Take Five for Accounting
The booming economy that led to the creation of the accounting and business administration department didn’t last long. The Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War stifled growth at the university. But by 1952, advancements in the accounting profession and the tireless work of dedicated faculty had led to the establishment of the BYU Department of Accounting. Demand for accounting training subsequently intensified alongside a need for financial services in the business sector, and the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred by the department more than doubled in the next 20 years.1
By the mid-1970s, the stage was set for the Department of Accounting to make several big changes, including a move to autonomy. Spurred by international growth in the US business environment, the accounting department and a handful of other accounting schools led out in exploring a more in-depth approach to accounting education. “[In 1976] our faculty decided to put on a presentation called Take Five for Accounting,” remembers K. Fred Skousen, an emeritus accounting professor who was then director of the accounting department. “We invited leaders of industry, the accounting profession, and educators to BYU.” Take Five for Accounting proposed a progressive and innovative curriculum that would allow students to graduate with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in accounting in five years. It focused on preparing students to take the CMA and CPA exams and to “deal with the complex problems of industry.”2
It was “a different model of accounting education,” says Skousen, “based upon two years of general education, one year of intense accounting education in an integrated fashion, and then two more years in specialization.” Known as the school of accountancy movement, the fiveyear program became the national standard. Soon even state legislatures began requiring five years of education to sit for the CPA exam.
At the Take Five for Accounting presentation, the department also announced its new name: the Institute of Professional Accountancy (IPA). The name change was part of the program’s move to become an independent academic unit within the BYU Graduate School of Management, giving the program greater national influence and prominence. Then in 1983, to be more in step with other accounting programs, the IPA became the School of Accountancy.
Accounting for the Real World
Even as the school led the nation toward a new level of accounting education, in the late 1980s accounting programs as a whole struggled to keep pace with changes in the profession. Firms wanted students who could communicate well and solve modern problems, but accounting schools were focusing too narrowly on preparing students to pass exams. To incentivize curriculum reform, in 1989 the newly established Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) offered grants of $250,000 to schools with the most convincing proposals.
Eager to secure one of these grants, the SOA pulled together a committee of 10 forward-thinking accounting experts. The group devised a new curriculum structure that would help students develop the competencies professional accountants needed. The proposal was just what the AECC was looking for. BYU Marriott’s School of Accountancy received one of the grants and used it to develop the junior core, which became fully effective in fall 1991. Two years later, the SOA received the American Accounting Association’s Innovation in Accounting Education Award for its revolutionary curriculum.
The junior core continues today as a quintessential feature of the SOA’s accounting program. Newly admitted students are placed in one of six sections and immersed in accounting education over two semesters. “Effectively, it’s a single course of instruction,” says Monte Swain, BYU Marriott’s Deloitte & Touche Professor, who has been teaching in the core since 1991. “It’s a commitment by the faculty to integrate across classes.” Instead of the students moving from class to class, the professors rotate from section to section. “The faculty become guests in the classroom; the students are the hosts.”
According to the school’s Nemrow Excellence in Teaching Professor, Cassy Budd, “the genius of the core is the integration of topics.” Budd coordinates and teaches in the core; she’s also the school’s first permanent female faculty hire. Budd graduated from the SOA in 1990 and didn’t pass through the junior core herself. “I don’t think I had a truly holistic understanding of the way business worked until I was actually immersed in business and working in my career,” she says. “[The junior core] really does turn out students who have a depth of understanding that is different because they see things in a more connected fashion.”
Early on, the core looked at business cycles from every disciplinary angle—financial, audit, tax, and so on. The courses have since been divided into different accounting disciplines, but each class is synced so that students learn about business cycles and professional competencies in each course at the same time.
The junior core wasn’t altogether a new idea. Rather, Skousen says, “it was more of an evolution” of the integrated core that started with Take Five. The junior core took BYU accounting education and made it “more like [accounting] is in the real world.”
Ultimately, what makes the curriculum work is the faculty’s esprit de corps, humility, and willingness to intensely collaborate with each other. “We are committed to something bigger than ourselves,” Swain says—something they are “willing to sacrifice for.”
A Deliberate Pursuit of Excellence
In the last quarter century, the SOA has produced a stream of achievements and innovation—“a chorus of events,” as Swain puts it. SOA students regularly take home trophies at national competitions, the SOA now has study abroad programs in Europe and Ghana, students consistently have one of the highest pass rates on the CMA and CPA exams, and the school prepares more students for PhD programs than any other school thanks to the PhD prep program.
Of particular pride to the school is its Public Accounting Report ranking. In 1995 the report placed both the SOA undergraduate and graduate programs in the top three programs in the country, and they’ve stayed there. What’s more, other entities consistently rank the school in the top 10. SOA director Doug Prawitt attributes this accomplishment to the students: “They are capable of learning at a high level, so we hit them hard. And they blow people away with how well prepared they are.”
Practice-relevant research has also moved into the spotlight. During the 1980s, faculty began intentionally engaging in research. In 2008, with the help of many students, professors Scott Summers and David Wood created a now heavily trafficked research-ranking website that orders individuals and institutions based on their publications in 12 academic accounting journals. In 2009 the SOA was ranked No. 30 in terms of research; by 2020 the school had moved into the No. 3 spot.
As for that innovative spirit, it’s imprinted on the school’s DNA. Just this past year, the faculty revamped the junior core to match what’s happening in practice. Courses on big data, critical thinking, and deeper integration of accounting topics were added while existing courses were slimmed down. “It became apparent that we really needed to do more than small dial turns,” Budd says. “Accountants have needed to be more flexible in the big-data arena so that they can continue to be the ones who keep people accountable.”
Additional changes at the school are certain as rapid technology development continues. Those changes are at the forefront of Prawitt’s mind. “This is what keeps me up at night,” he says. “Technology is changing the business world. How do we stay on top of that and make sure that our students are the best prepared in the world in dealing with a rapidly changing environment?” For Prawitt, the answer is to infuse accounting curriculum with technology. “We need to ride the wave of technology and not get buried by it,” he says.
And if the past 100 years are any indicator, in the next century the BYU School of Accountancy will not only be riding waves but making them.
The First Accounting Course
ACCOUNTING TOOK AN OFFICIAL PLACE AT THE TABLE 100 YEARS AGO, but it’s been a part of the university since its beginning. One year after the university was established in 1875 as Brigham Young Academy, accounting took root in the form of bookkeeping classes. A man by the name of John Booth was hired to teach the subject. Booth was a young, multifaceted lawyer who had been serving as Provo’s first city attorney since his admittance to the bar two years earlier.
The initial bookkeeping course covered a range of accounting-related topics, including ratios and proportions, simple and compound interest, and brokerage. By the end of the first year, Booth had introduced more-advanced topics. In fall 1877, he reported to the administration: “The classes are progressing nicely with the exception of too much keenness in the bookkeeping class to make money. . . . The students are so anxious to get out and make money that it is hindering their class work.”3
Booth left the academy in 1881 to pursue law and other business ventures full-time. By then, bookkeeping had become a required course. The 1886–87 school curricular read: “Able and enthusiastic instructors set forth [bookkeeping] principles in such clear shape, and add to this such thorough drill and practice, that the study at once becomes fascinating, plain, and easy. Bookkeeping as here taught . . . is now brought within the capacity of the average boy or girl.”4
The PhD Path
With a PhD diploma fresh in hand, Doug Prawitt returned to BYU in early 1993 as a research-oriented auditing professor. He set his first research assistant to work helping him craft his dissertation into a publishable article. When the assistant expressed interest in pursuing a PhD himself, Prawitt sat down with him and outlined classes he should take to prepare. The assistant later applied to seven premier accounting PhD programs and was accepted into all of them.
“It was this eye-opening thing,” Prawitt says. “I realized that there are not that many people out there who proactively know what they want to get into and then proactively prepare themselves for a PhD in accounting.”
Prawitt began equipping other students for doctoral studies. After more success, he proposed that the school create an official PhD prep program. “Imagine what this could be like in 10, 15, 20 years from now if we were graduating five or seven people each year and putting them into PhD programs,” he said to the administration. A formal version of Prawitt’s program took flight in 1999—and it included much more than a list of classes students should take. There were workshops, social activities, a network of other PhD-interested students who could lend support, and opportunities to do research and teach introductory accounting classes.
In the past 20 years, more than 180 BYU accounting students have passed through the track and enrolled in a PhD program—some years placing up to 10 percent of all students entering doctoral studies nationwide. In 2007 the SOA received the American Accounting Association’s Innovation in Accounting Education Award for the program—making BYU the only university to receive the award twice.
The SOA has become a destination for top accounting researchers to present their work. Additionally, many of the students who passed through the program are now distinguished professors at other universities. Two have returned to BYU Marriott’s School of Accountancy. That, Prawitt says, may be the greatest benefit. The prep program has given the school a pool of excellent candidates to draw from when faculty vacancies arise. “Who is lighting the world on fire?” Prawitt says. “Let’s see if they might be interested in coming back to BYU.”
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NOTES
- See Leon W. Woodfield, BYU School of Accountancy and Information Systems, 1876–1990 (Provo: BYU, 1991), 47.
- John W. Hardy, E. Dee Hubbard, and Dale H. Taylor, “Take Five for Management Accounting,” Managerial Planning (November/December 1979): 17.
- In Gerald B. Warnick, An Early History of Accounting at Brigham Young University (1962); see also Woodfield, BYU SOAIS, 11.
- In Warnick, An Early History; see also Woodfield, BYU SOAIS, 17–18.
