Sound too good to be true? Yeah, there's a downside. Once you finish you have to actually be an Accountant. https://goingconcern.com/desperate-for-more-accounting-professors-the-aicpa-is-literally-paying-people-to-take-the-phd-track/
Scholarships and other forms of support are not uncommon in natural sciences. In fact, funded PhDs in Accounting and Finance are available for a long time; news here is AICPA got involved. Real downside here is that not everyone can cut it to even do upper-division Accounting coursework required to get a prerequisite Bachelor's, let alone pass CPA exams. Accounting is not easy, especially for a career-changer.
I'm only familiar with taxation, which is a bunch of legal stuff, so I don't know much about accounting research. To me, it appears that accounting is not very conducive to necessary or even interesting research, but I could be wrong. Maybe it's time for the accounting field to consider whether a PhD is an appropriate degree for accounting professors. One only needs a J.D. to become a law professor, and a lot of them have LLMs. Only requiring a master's degree plus a CPA and a few years of professional experience is one option. I've seen some taxation teaching jobs that only require a J.D., LLM, or CPA. Or, the accounting discipline can create its own professional doctorate that's a real alternative to the PhD. I don't see the DBA as a real alternative because the research required is about the same.
Accounting is a hard subject. Of all the classes I teach, it's the one that takes up most of my prep time.
If earnings is the key incentive for accountants to become phd then the incentive is not there. Many professions have changed this phd deliema by making the first or second degree the doctorate. D.Acc my vote. All tasks performed my the cpa can be done without a phd.
Amen. To be fair, there is some interesting accou ting research on the margins but the debits have been on the left, credits on the right... for a long time without change.
There is a fair amount of interesting qualitative research on accounting being conducted. I am not sure how they can be applied in the corporate world. However they do put accounting in a different light. An example is that accounting is objective and non-bias, well that may not be quite true but accounting was built on that notion.
Agreed; intersection of philosophy and accounting... don’t see much support for the research if you can’t relate it to shareholder value.
