Transitioning into Academia: A New Pathway for Practitioners

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The shortage of accounting faculty in the United States has been a serious concern for academicians, policymakers, and the profession for decades. One solution to the problem may be convincing more practitioners to become faculty members, and, indeed, a significant number of practitioners are interested in teaching. Though certain barriers, such as the time commitment required to earn a doctorate, have kept many practitioners from joining the ranks of the faculty, recent developments have opened new pathways for practicing accountants to enter academia. One of these is the development of flexible practitioner-oriented doctoral programs that enable practitioners to study part time while still earning a salary. THE FACULTY SHORTAGE AND WHY PRACTITIONERS MAY BE THE ANSWER In the 2013-14 school year, a record 207,071 undergraduates enrolled in accounting programs--over 73,000 more than enrolled in 2001-02. Across all programs, according to an annual supply-and-demand survey by the AICPA, enrollments have risen every year from 1999-2000 to the present (see 2015 Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits, available at tinyurl.com/q28aomd). Yet enrollments in accounting Ph.D. programs have not increased much over the past six years, leading to a shortage of full-time faculty. The accounting profession has taken steps to address the faculty shortage, among them launching the Accounting Doctoral Scholars (ADS) Program in 2008. Over 120 sponsors donated $17 million to this program, which was intended to incrementally increase the Ph.D. pipeline. To date, 108 current and future ADS Ph.D.s have made the transition from practice to academia. The AICPA Foundation will begin a new doctoral initiative in 2016. The shortage persists, however, and it has forced close to two-thirds of all accounting departments to increase undergraduate class sizes in the past five years, a recent survey of 204 accounting program administrators found. According to the survey, which was conducted by accounting professors R. David Plumlee and Philip M.J. Reckers, 39% of small and 30% of large accredited schools have had to reduce the number of electives they offer. Plumlee and Reckers also found that more than 70% of administrators said their programs had been harmed by the faculty shortage. The problem was most severe among smaller accredited schools, where 96% of administrators reported that the shortage had been detrimental to their programs (see "Lessons Not Learned: Why Is There Still a Crisis-Level Shortage of Accounting Ph.D.s? " Accounting Horizons, June 2014, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 313-330). Many schools have coped with the shortage by hiring part-time or adjunct instructors, who do not generally need to hold doctorates, to teach classes. However, most accounting programs still need to hire a certain percentage of doctorally trained faculty to meet accreditation standards. Schools also benefit by hiring permanent faculty members as they enjoy enhanced reputations when their full-time faculty publish research. One partial solution to the shortage may be improving pathways to academia for practitioners. Signs exist that significant numbers of practitioners have an interest in pursuing careers as educators. A survey of 231 practitioners conducted by Michael O. Mensah and three of the authors of this article, for example, revealed that more than 15% of respondents had a fairly high level of interest in full-time teaching (see "The Accounting Doctorate Shortage," available at tinyurl.com/p6cfr3h). In addition, more than 2,000 people recently signed up for an American Accounting Association (AAA) webcast on transitioning from practice to academia, suggesting that a good number of practitioners show an interest in academic careers. In a recent survey conducted by three of the authors of this article, practitioners who became faculty reported high levels of satisfaction with their careers (tinyurl. …