Certified Evaluation and Accreditation Results forProfessional Graduate Business School

Graduate School of Accountancy University of Hyogo

Basic Information of the Institution
Ownership: PublicLocation: Hyogo, Japan

Accreditation Status
Year of the Review: 2015
Accreditation Status: Accredited（Accreditation Period: April.01.2016 – March.31.2021）

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Certified Evaluation and Accreditation Resultfor the Graduate School of Accountancy, University of Hyogo
The graduate program in the Graduate School of Accountancy (hereafter, the Program),
University of Hyogo, defines its purpose in its Regulation of Graduate School ofAccountancy as “to foster accounting professionals who possess not only goodcompetencies, professional ethics, and expertise but also excellent and professional skills
including a broad perspective, the ability to think and judge, an international mindset, andleadership.” Given these functions, the Program specifies and sets the educational goal of
training accounting professionals who will work in one of three areas: audit certification
and assurance, the private sector, or the public sector.
The Program not only trains certified public accountants and meets the basic
mission of professional graduate schools in the field of accounting but also fulfills thepurpose of professional degree programs and lives up to wide-ranging social needs aswell.
Based on the intentions above, the Program’s curriculum follows the policy on
degree award and the curriculum design policy that states as its goal “to grant Masters ofProfessional Accountancy to those who have been equipped with a variety of skills suchas expertise and skills required by professional accountants, appropriate judgment rooted
in professional ethics, and comprehension and applied skills to meet wide-ranging social
needs in the future.” The subjects available are classified into ten fields, each of which issegmented into “basic subjects,” “advanced subjects,” and “applied and practicalsubjects.” The curriculum for each semester provides students with learning models fordifferent occupations such as certified public accountants, licensed tax accountants,professional accountants in business (finance section), professional accountants in the
public sector, and special officers for national tax. These learning models are designed tohelp students learn systematically and gradually. In particular, the Program has improvedits quality by providing a number of subjects concerning the accounts in the public sector
to develop professionals of this sector. These efforts are commendable, as this Program isthe only one of its kind among professional graduate accounting schools.
In an effort to train accountants with a global perspective, the Program offers
subjects such as International Accounting, English Accounting, and International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Accounting as part of its Accounting
Internationalization Project, which is included in the Enhancing Distinctiveness Projectof the University of Hyogo. The Program is reportedly considering efforts to furtherenrich the Project, and its future efforts are expected to be successful.
The Program has fifteen full-time faculty members, including nine academic
faculty members and six practitioner faculty members. All of the faculty members arefound to have superior qualities in education. The Program stations faculty
proportionately in both academic and practitioner, and it has been designed tosystematically offer an education in which theory and practice are closely intertwined.
The Program’s facilities and equipment include the library and the Accountingand Management Resource Room (shared with the Graduate School of Business),well-equipped with textbooks, professional journals, and references which is utilized byboth students and faculty members. These facilities are systematically organized, making
the resources highly convenient to use, and include electronic media sophisticatedenough to allow students to study and teaching staff to conduct research and education.
The Program has made appropriate efforts for education and research, yetseveral suggested modifications can help enhance its efforts.
First, the syllabus of the Program introduces the topics of each lecture for all
subjects in “Lectures and Class Schedules.” However, while “Advanced Subjects” appear
to provide either lecture-based or seminar-based classes according to the nature of eachsubject, in many of them the descriptions are not clear enough to indicate whether classes

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are lecture-based or seminar-based. The syllabus should be described in greater detail,such as including the curriculum and class procedures.
Additionally, in recent years it has been noted that the Program has not fulfilled
its admission quota. This issue is not unique to this Program but is ubiquitous inprofessional graduate schools overall. Considering this issue grave, the Program has
examined many different ways to deal with admission quotas and now has a plan toestablished a continuous education program in collaboration with the School of Business
Administration at the University by accepting early graduates of its undergraduate
program to fulfill the quota. The Program is expected to continue these efforts.
The review outlined above lead Japan University Accreditation Association(JUAA) to conclude that the educational and research activities of the Program respect
legal matters of professional graduate schools and meet JUAA’s basic requirements for
professional graduate schools in the field of accounting. As such, the Program, which hascontinued the traditional accounting education offered by its precursor (Kobe Universityof Commerce), boasts many excellent efforts that can be models for professional graduate
schools in other fields of accounting, including the educational activity mentioned above.
The Program is expected to take the recommendations pointed out in this accreditation
review as advice to help improve the educational quality and to further develop andenhance these efforts when developing a midterm and long-term vision.