MAJOR INFLUENCES ON ACCOUNTING EDUCATION.

The direction, nature, emphasis and objectives of accounting education, since its beginning at the collegiate level, have been influenced by a number of ideas, conditions, and relationships with other segments of academic work. This paper attempts to outline and assess the roles which the more important of these influences have played in the development of accounting education. The movement for collegiate training for accounting quickly ran aground in some colleges, due to the opposition of departments of economics. The dominant attitude of the economists in this group of colleges was that business courses in general, and accounting courses in particular, had no place in the college catalog. The study of Marshallian economics, it was asserted, was adequate intellectual nourishment for everybody, supplemented perhaps by a half-dozen courses in the periphery of the field dealing with "applied" studies. In other colleges, the movement to establish accounting programs met a different, though equally determined, tactical opposition from the economists.