More Accounting Theory or More Information Technology?

Abstract

It has been said that accounting faculty should teach theory and let students figure out how to apply the theory in the real world. This argument assumes that students arrive with technology skills sufficient to serve as a base for their college and even their professional careers. This paper uses survey methods to analyze the technology skills of undergraduate accounting students to determine their technological strengths and weaknesses. With this information, it is possible to gain a more accurate undergraduate student technology profile. We find that a large fraction of students are not proficient in requisite technologies even after completing the majority of their undergraduate accounting course work. We believe this supports the argument that the accounting curriculum would benefit from an increase in technology training. The technologies students were most interested in learning were tax software, small business accounting, generalized audit software and spreadsheets.