Free Spreadsheet Software
December 13, 2005 message from Richard J. Campbell
[campbell@RIO.EDU]
Ray Ozzie of Microsoft has been talking
about providing pieces of Office as a web service.
Here is a link to a free online
spreadsheet:
www.numsum.com
Richard J. Campbell
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)
unveiled a new Information Technology (IT) community Web site that
contains resources, tools and guidance for CPAs interested or practicing
in IT ---
http://infotech.aicpa.org/
Technology is the great enabler and one of
the most powerful forces of change. Ever evolving and dynamic,
technology touches much of what we do as CPAs. CPAs are able to
utilize and leverage technology in ways that add value to clients,
customers, and employers. The AICPA supports technology and
technology-enabled services to improve business objectives and
decision-making processes, including: business application
processes, system integrity, knowledge management, system security,
and the integration of new business processes and practices.
Beyond Excel
ActiveData for Office is a major step forward for our
users and for InfromationActive,” Michael Pluscauskas, President of
InformationActive Inc. said in a press release announcing the general
availability. “This product provides our customers with a flexible and dynamic
platform that not only breaks the Microsoft Excel™ row barrier, but also is
adaptable and expandable for future planned functionality. Users have been
asking for a powerful data analysis tool that works with Microsoft Office and we
have given them that and much more. I’m also proud of the fact that we’ve
provided an exceptionally robust product at a very competitive price.”
ActiveData for Office stretches the boundaries of traditional data analysis
tools by providing exceptional integration with Microsoft Office. Users can
append documents and web pages to their analysis and archive the entire file in
addition to analyzing millions of rows of data quickly thus providing new levels
of information control while still allowing the flexibility to view results
within ActiveDatae for Office or Microsoft Excel. ActiveData for Office also
includes macro capability for recording commonly performed tasks and full audit
trail capabilities.
"The Next Level of Computer Aided Audit Tools," AccountingWeb, August 15,
2005 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101205
"Accounting Today Lists Top 100 Technology Products for 2005," SmartPros,
December 28, 2004 --- http://www.smartpros.com/x46317.xml
The December edition of Accounting Today,
a Thomson Media publication, published its 12th annual Top 100
Technology Products in the accounting profession, listing the best
and most proven applications in 17 categories.
All products listed offer users tools
they need to resolve both minor inconveniences and larger problems
that could threaten the health and lifeline of their businesses.
Products included on this year's roster
have been listed in the following categories: High-End and
Mid-Market Accounting; Small Business Accounting; Client Write-Up;
Customer Relationship Management; Enterprise Resource Planning;
Financial Planning; Fixed Assets; Forms; Non-Profits; Payroll;
Planning and Analysis; Practice Management; Tax Planning and
Preparation; Tax Research; and Trial Balance.
This year, two new categories -- Internet
Suites and Document Management -- have been added, and the Tax
Planning and Preparation categories have been combined to better
reflect the availability and range of products.
"We feel our 2005 ranking truly
represents the broad scope of technology solutions available
within the accounting profession," said Bill Carlino,
editor-in-chief of Accounting Today. "While some may
be quite familiar to practitioners, others have begun to establish
a high-profile presence within technology circles."
Each year, products are evaluated by the
magazine's editorial staff and judged by their quality,
practitioner acceptance, market visibility, product performance,
vendor support and product innovation, measured against
marketplace needs.
The 2005 Top 100 Technology Product
listing is also available on Accounting Today's sister
Web site, www.webcpa.com.
FOUNDATION Construction Accounting Software Wins Award
FOUNDATION Software received the award as the
software supplier for Lighthouse Electric, a two-time winner of the
prestigious Silver Vision Award in the subcontractor category. Lighthouse
earned its second Vision Award for innovative labor management plan that
promises to save over $100,000 in labor costs each year. By using the
features of FOUNDATION, as well as those form Congistics ControlBoard, a
tracking and scheduling application, Lighthouse was able to create a
separate function for the management of manpower that utilizes a single
powerful Microsoft SQL database. “Our challenge was to utilize technology
and procedures in a way that would easily disburse and control our biggest
cost: labor,” Ron Felix, CIO of Lighthouse Electric said in explaining how
technology and business came together for his company.
"FOUNDATION Construction Accounting Software Wins Award," AccountingWeb,
September 6, 2005 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101265
"Award-Winning Accounting Software for Small Businesses," AccountingWeb,
July 22, 2005 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101123
Sage Software produces two of the top
accounting solutions for small businesses, not just according to
accountants but also according to the technology crowd. Simply
Accounting and Peachtree, two of Sage Software’s accounting solutions
have won honors and awards from the media recently. Peachtree Premium
Accounting 2005 was awarded five of five stars and Simply Accounting
received four-and-a-half of five stars in CPA Technology Advisor’s
listing of Small Business Accounting Software for 2005. The evaluation
looked at six categories:
Basic Functionality/Ease-of-Use
Available Modules/Customization for Vertical
Industries
Expandability
Reporting and Management Functions
Audit Trail, Integrity and Accountant Control
Tools and
Help and Support Options. Peachtree Premium
received five stars in five categories to earn its five star overall
rating. The only category it did not earn five stars in was Help and
Support, where its well-built help utility, online Peachtree Knowledge
Center, additional support features and several optional support plans
merited only four-and-a-half stars.
Simply Accounting received four-and-a-half
stars in five categories. More than 100 customizable predefined reports
which can be integrated with both MS Word and Excel as well as a version
of Crystal Reports allowing for custom report creation and combine it
with the Daily Business Manager, payroll support functions and inventory
management earned Simply Accounting it’s only five star rating in
Reporting and Management Functions.
Simply Accounting has also been honored with a
2005 World Class Award for small business accounting from PC World. It
is the third consecutive year Simply Accounting has earned this honor.
The World Class Awards honor products combining practical features with
innovation and that reflect the rapidly changing technology marketplace.
PC World’s editors pick winners for their exemplary design, usability,
features, performance, innovation and price.
“The ultimate buyers guide, World Class Awards
set the standard for excellence in the high-tech and consumer
electronics industries,” states PC World editor-in-chief Harry
McCracken. “From desktop publishers to travel routers to satellite radio
and video instant messenger services, the editors reward the finest
products and most outstanding performers in this annual award program.
Congratulations to Simply Accounting.”
Peachtree is Sage Software’s primary brand for
small business accounting in the U.S. Simply Accounting is the
bestselling small business accounting product in Canada.
"Companies Offer Tech Solutions For Complex Finance Problems
," AccountingWEB, May 9, 2005 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=100875
Software makers are coming up with new ways for
companies to manage vast amounts of financial data. From the complexities of
complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform law to the everyday tasks
involved with financial reporting, new products are being offered to help
companies do the work more efficiently.
Here is a sampling:
Applix, Inc. – The software maker announced Tuesday
that it has upgraded its TM1 suite so that users can do more sophisticated
financial reporting and consolidations. Wizards have been added so that
financial data can be imported more quickly from general ledger, accounting
and legacy systems into Business Performance Management applications.
A new offering is TM1 Financial Consolidations,
which supports journal entries, inter-company eliminations and other
activities specific to the consolidation process.
“Good financial planning begins with the actuals,
is followed by a planning process and ends with a comparison of the
subsequent actual results to the plan,” said David Menninger, Applix vice
president, worldwide marketing and product management, in a statement. “The
ability to access information from multiple sources, present it in an
easy-to-use, familiar environment and act upon it for everything from
reporting to planning to forecasting enables companies to reduce cycle
times, increase competitiveness and have greater trust in the information.”
The improvements are available for beta use now.
Contact Brian Barnes at bbarnes@applix.com
Movaris - The company, which provides Financial
Control Management software, has developed Certainty 8.1 to allow companies
to manage reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, and personnel changes
as they affect the financial control environment.
Certainty 8.1 can change the users who are assigned
to hundreds of financial control tests, which improves corporate security.
It can update multiple financial control attributes. It allows for
comparisons of control activities at different points in time. “With
visibility into changes in the control environment over time, managers
identify improvements and the impact of change on their business unit, and
auditors identify the controls in place at the time an issue or exception
occurred,” the company said.
Stan Tims, vice president of marketing and business
development at Movaris, said in a statement that companies will need to
consolidate time-consuming tasks to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley in a
cost-effective way.
"Key technologies can reduce the cost of SOX
compliance upwards of 25 percent, as compliance has been a mostly manual,
people-intensive process. Most companies cannot (and should not) maintain
this level of manpower, though the need for compliance will not shrink,"
said John Hagerty, analyst for AMR Research in a January 2005 report, SOX
Decisions for 2005: Step Up Technology Investments.
- Continued in the article
-
Great Comparisons of Tax Software
"Tax Software Makes the Grade, by Stanley Zarowin, Journal of
Accountancy, September 2005, pp. 48-60 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/sep2005/zarowin.htm
-
- When asked to rate their overall satisfaction
with the 13 tax software products in the survey this year, the 3,156
AICPA Tax Section members who responded to the survey came up with a
combined average score of 4.23 (out of a perfect 5.00), a significant
gain from last year’s 4.03. In addition to the eight packages rated last
year, three new products received the minimum required 10 responses from
our CPA respondents. (For details about all the vendors in the survey,
see exhibit 1; for a complete scorecard on the satisfaction grades, see
exhibit 2; and for technical details about the products, see exhibit 6.)
Tied for first place in the
overall-satisfaction category, with ratings of 4.46, were Intuit’s
highly popular Lacerte and the much smaller Dunphy System’s Tax Software
for the Professional. Lacerte inched up from last year’s 4.32 rating;
since Dunphy was not in last year’s survey, it has no year-ago rating.
Tied for second place with 4.44 were Drake Software and Taxware System’s
Taxware Tax Preparation; both are new to the survey this year.
Continued in detail in the article
September 7, 2005 reply from Kurt Wilner
Dear Professor Jensen, I feel kinda cheated
that your post didn't look beyond the 'big boys' surveyed by the
AICPA. In my case, I jumped from Lacerte the year after Intuit
bought it -- and jacked its fees up majorly -- to ATX, which seems
to serve a huge base of "small practices" such as my own. ATX makes
the grade in 'The CPA Journal" and other mags; so I wonder why it's
neglected by your own cite -- which, in general, I prize for its
independence from commercial trends. Could you comment further upon
this, please?
Sincerely yours,
Kurt Wilner
On July 11, 2005 Barbara Scofield clued me into IDEA Software
described at
http://www.generalideasinc.com/cc_solutions.asp
NextNet 5.0 for New Product Development
NextNet 5.0 enables you to find the best ideas for new products,
fast. By expanding your reach, streamlining evaluation,
prioritization, and selection, the best product ideas and
enhancements rise to top of the heap. NextNet brings predictability
and profitability to the so-called 'fuzzy front end' of product
development. NextNet has been used by product development teams in
major corporations to rapidly discover and develop multi-million
dollar market opportunities.
(Click Here)
SaveNet 5.0 for Process Improvement
SaveNet 5.0 is the tried and true solution to make your operation
more efficient. SaveNet enables you to eliminate waste, improve
yields and streamline processes all with little or no addtional
management time. SaveNet is also a powerful motivator of employee
morale and team spirit in the workplace. SaveNet has been used by
major corporations to continously discover hundreds of thousands of
dollars in cost-savings.
Custom Innovation Management Solutions
The General Ideas Innovation Pipleline Management (IPM) Platform is
a highly versatile software platform that can be configured and
customized for specialized applications of Idea Management. General
Ideas employs the full flexibility of the IPM platform, configuring
workflows, alerts, data capture forms, permissions and metrics to
ensure effective Innovation Management. General Ideas has worked
with companies to create custom Idea Management solutions for:
Intellectual Property, IT Portfolio Management, Six Sigma, Employee
Suggestions, Total Quality Management, Corporate Strategy, Marketing
and Business Development.
July 13, 2005 reply from Bonnie Morris, West Virginia University
[bmorris@WVU.EDU]
Contact Audimation Services 888 641 2800
info@audimation.com
They have IDEA 2004 Workbook. It has 3
datasets and exercises (AR, AP and Fraud Investigation, and
Inventory Analysis)
Accounting Software
EmeraldKey Technologies, Inc. introduced
Envision Accounting Software for accounting and financial
professionals last week. Envision Accounting Software provides a
comprehensive solution to meet all business management needs,
including financial accounting, project management, client
management, time and expenses, billing, payroll, budgets/forecasts,
real-time reporting and Web-enablement.
"Introducing Envision Accounting Software for Accounting & Financial
Professionals," AccountingWeb, August 24, 2005 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=101233
Accounting Professional Site Links
The CPA Team http://www.cpateam.com/
Freeware Guide for Business and Finance ---
http://www.freeware-guide.com/dir/business/finance.html
Tax Software
- AccountingWEB's Software Resource Center --- http://www.accountingweb.com/item/52249
- Software Search Here www.findaccountingsoftware.com
Accounting Software Library http://www.excelco.com/tal.htm
- New stuff --- http://www.electronicaccountant.com/
- Old Stuff --- Jensen & Sandlin Survey of U.S.
Accountancy Education Programs
- Bruce Hutton CGA -
Accounting: Software, Publications and Bookkeeping Software
- The Software Review Source (Add Your Own
Review)
- AccountingNet is the
complete online resource for accounting professionals: Accounting
- Beginning WebCT (Creation of Web Pages)
- Accounting Related
Resources
- Accounting Library FREE DEMO and FTP Page
- Accounting Systems -- Accounting System
Locator / Selector
-
AuditNet: Internet Resources for Auditors
- Excelco / SouthWare Main Page
- Peachtree Software Home Page
- Home Page for MicroMash
- archipelago productions (Distributed
Learning Courses)
- TAL Standard Edition "Quick
LOOK" AIA Accounting Information Systems
- Spreadsheets in
Education
-
NPO
= Not-for-Profit
"Sizing
Up NPO Software," Roberta Ann Jones, Journal of Accountancy,
November 2000, pp. 28-44 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov2000/jones.htm
"Using Software to Sniff Out Fraud," Amey Stone, Business
Week, September 30, 2004 --- http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2003/tc20030930_2727_tc131.htm
The Journal of Accountancy ran an article showing how a
Benford's Law application in Excel led to discovery of a fraud.
"Turn Excel Into a Financial Sleuth," by Anna M. Rose
and Jacob M. Rose, The Journal of Accountancy, August 2003
--- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2003/rose.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting software are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#software
Technology sites from Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy,
June 2005 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jun2005/news_web.htm
|
Check Out
Check 21
www.aicpa.org/financialliteracy
The AICPA Financial
Literacy Resource Center has added a
section to its Web site about the Check
Clearing for the 21st Century Act (Check
21). The Web site discusses the act’s
implications for auditors and
businesses, and provides links to the
Federal Reserve Board’s “Check Clearing
for the 21st Century Act” Web page and
implementation information, two
frequently-asked-questions sections and
a consumer guide.
A Site
With Byte
www.freebyte.com
CPAs and IT managers
will want to bookmark this Smart Stop
loaded with links to free accounting,
antispam and backup software, currency
and document converters, mortgage
calculators, computing and financial
glossaries and Web browsers. There are
online dictionaries in English as well
as French, German, Italian and Spanish.
There’s also free clipart, fonts and
photos that CPAs can use for marketing
brochures, and everyone can take a break
in the Jokes and Humor and Free Games
sections.
Figure for
Free
www.calculator.com
Sure, you already have
mortgage, percentage, scientific and
standard e-calculators. This site offers
calculators for car leases, fractions,
graphing, and home equity and general
loans, plus converters for currency,
international time, temperature and
units of measure. There’s also a link to
the tax-preparation-service calculator
site www.internet-taxprep.com with tools
CPAs can use to calculate investments,
mortgage refinancing and Roth IRA
returns for clients. Other resources
include current and archived tax news, a
2005 tax guide and information about a
free online tax-filing program.
Tech Talk
www.itmweb.com
CITPs and other
information technology professionals can
find resources here on IT capital
spending, department budgets and salary
ranges. Download the demo software, read
book reviews or subscribe to the free
monthly IT e-zine and newsletter.
Technology Articles has tips on making
your e-mails sound more professional and
improving your project team management
skills, while the Job Listing Centers
invite employers to post open positions.
IT White Paper Spotlight offers
documents on subjects from artificial
intelligence to knowledge management.
Painless
Projects
www.ittoolkit.com
Looking for more
efficient ways to manage IT procedures
and roll out new technology? Then
register for a free membership at this
e-stop to access information on managing
IT operations and receive a monthly
e-mail reporting on the latest task
management resources. Members can
download planning checklists, mission
and scope statement templates and white
papers on IT process improvements. |
|
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm
Information Technology Sites, From Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of
Accountancy, May 2004, Page 23 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/may2004/news_web.htm
| THE
INTERNET |
| SMART
STOPS ON THE WEB |
|
For IT Educators
and Leaders
www.techlearning.com
Here, CPAs who specialize in
IT professional development can find helpful
resources such as tips on needs assessment for
offices or classrooms and articles including
“Data Can Drive Development.” Users also
can read software reviews and find links to
general search engines as well as to an
encyclopedia with more than 20,000 IT terms.
Free Online
Resources
www.eweek.com
CPA IT professionals can
register for free at this Web stop and enroll
in gratis e-seminars on topics such as best
practices for enterprise data integration,
information security and wireless LAN
deployment. Users seeking to advise clients on
application storage management systems will
want to give them the quick quiz “Do You
Need to Automate?” before proceeding.
Read to Keep Up
www.technologyreview.com
In addition to providing free
either two hard copies of the magazine or a
digital issue, Technology Review offers
visitors to its Web site a free subscription
to the newsletter Technology Review Update.
Other gratis offerings include the sections
Predictive Markets, where users can predict
future outcomes of IT issues to win prizes,
and Research News, which has links to
information on industry innovations.
Less Search
Time, More Results
www.keepmedia.com
CPAs looking for IT articles
from the past 12 years can register here for a
free seven-day trial. Users can search more
than 150 publications, store favorite articles
directly online at this site, keep track of
what they’ve looked at—saved or not—and
let KeepMedia find other articles based on
their previous choices. A general search on
the word technology returned more
than 14,000 results.
Telecommuting
Technology
www.langhoff.com
CPAs working from home or
remote locations can find case studies and
statistics on this trend through the
frequently-asked-questions section at June
Langhoff’s Telecommuting Resource Center.
Also, visitors can look through the business
travelers’ survival guide to find tips and
links to airlines, ATM locations and business
services for mobile users. Companies
interested in starting a work-at-home program
can research the costs and get links to model
telecommuting agreements and policies.
“The Silly Con
Valley Report”
www.mikeslist.com
Don’t be fooled by this Web
site’s light tone: Useful nuggets of
information, including the latest reports on
software designs, how to thwart spam and a
300-Gb hard drive, can be found beneath all
the humor. Also, users can read up on the
latest in broadband and handheld technology
and Windows XP through the newsfeed links as
well as join up for a free weekly
e-newsletter. |
|
- Bob Jensen's Links to Accounting Software and Vendors
(this list is outdated!)
- XBRL Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#TimelineXBRL
Accounting Related
Resources
- AccountingNet is the
complete online resource for accounting professionals: Accounting
- Accounting and Financial Information
- BUSINESS RESOURCES
- Accounting Net - Your Internet Link to
the Accounting World
- CPA Online: Your source for Accounting
Information on the Internet
- Bob Jensen's Vendor Database
(this list is outdated!)
- Course Resources
- CyberCpa - Resources
- Jensen & Sandlin Survey of Accountancy Education Programs
(Outdated)
- Jensen & Sandlin Survey of Commerical Learning Materials in
Accounting (Outdated)
- K2 Enterprises Accountants Hotlist
- Site Seeker
- Home Page for MicroMash
-
Worldwide Directory of Accountants and Consultants ---
http://www.searchsystems.net/list.php?nid=62
Bob Jensen's helpers on how choosing professional advice ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm
Information Systems Audit and Control Association and Foundation
Web (ISACA) site --- http://www.isaca.org/
Electronic Commerce: http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm
Assurance Services: http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/assurance.htm
Audit Analytics ---
http://www.auditanalytics.com/0002/
A Premium Audit Industry Market Intelligence
Service Audit Analytics has information on over 20,000 public
registrants and over 1,500 audit firms. It is the most comprehensive
market intelligence tool for the audit industry available today.
AuditAnalytics.com currently offers over 60 data fields to its users.
Access to this data is available as on-line user subscriptions, as
enterprise data feed subscriptions, and in custom reports.
Huron is the
main source of restatement statistics ---
http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/
Gerald Trite's great set of
links ---
http://iago.stfx.ca/people/gtrites/Docs/bookmark.htm
Online Magazine (for Information Professionals) ---
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/index.html
ONLINE is written for Information
Professionals and provides articles, product reviews, case studies,
evaluation, and informed opinion about selecting, using, and managing
electronic information products, plus industry and professional
information about online database systems, CD-ROM, and the Internet.
This site contains selected full-text articles and news from each
issue of the magazine. Direct letters to the editor to Marydee Ojala
(
Marydee@xmission.com ). If you are interested in writing for
ONLINE, please see the Authors' Guidelines.
-
-
-
Links to Journals on
Artificial Intelligence
American Accounting
Association Special Interest Group
Brown and O'Leary
Tutorial
Gal and Steinbart
Bibliography of AI
Literature (With Updates)
A. B. I. S. A. (index)
Finance and Investment Links
(Neural Networks)
WebBots
MultiLogic (EXSYS Expert Systems Software)
- Accounting Professional Site
Links
The CPA Team
http://www.cpateam.com/
Electronic Commerce ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm
Assurance Serivices ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/assurance.htm
(Including SysTrust, WebTrust, Truste, BBB, etc.)
- For Eldercare
Information
www.elderweb.com
Impact of
Technology
New Opportunities
Megatrends
Range of
Services
Site Map
AICPA Discussion Forum
AICPA Feedback
PC Meter Tackles Web
Measurement (Accounitng Assurance Services)
CPA
WebTrust Slides
Computer Security Issues
Introduction to Internet Security
AICPA CPE Course
The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) For
Software
Deloitte & Touche Risk Management
& Control: Visual Assurance -
"The Business of Bankruptcy:
CPAs can't make a bad economy go away, but they can provide value to clients on
the ropes," y Victoria Zunitch and Michael Hayes, Journal of Accountancy,
February 2002, pp. 35-39 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/feb2002/zunitch.htm
|
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY |
|
A
CPA FIRM WITH A CLIENT filing for bankruptcy has
a responsibility to serve the client as well as an
opportunity to compete for some of the work on the
case—and through it develop a specialty. The need for
bankruptcy services is expected to grow for a while.
CPAs
SOMETIMES ARE THRUST into the field when a client
goes broke, but a firm that has time to plan can develop
the niche strategically. The bulk of bankruptcy work comes
from attorney referrals.
A PERUSAL
OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS of your local bankruptcy
court and the U.S. Trustee Office will identify the
accountants, lawyers, trustees, examiners and other
advisers who are players in your market.
THE
EXACTING BILLING requirements of the court affect
every novice in bankruptcy work and are a continual
challenge even for seasoned practitioners. CPAs are at
minimum risk because the court’s first administrative
priority is to cover the expenses of a bankruptcy.
DURING A
BANKRUPTCY, debtors, creditors’ committees,
trustees and other entities need CPA services. A firm
should look first for clients that need services it
already provides, such as tax preparation or monthly
reports.
CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST
CONSIDERATIONS usually require the work to be
parceled out to several accounting firms, which means
attorneys are always looking for new CPAs with whom to
work. |
|
VICTORIA
M. ZUNITCH is a freelance business writer based in New
York. Her e-mail address is
VZwriter@hotmail.com
MICHAEL HAYES is a senior editor on the JofA. Ms.
Hayes is an employee of the AICPA and her views, as
expressed in this article, do not necessarily reflect the
views of the Institute. Official positions are determined
through certain specific committee procedures, due process
and deliberation. |
From Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy,
February 2002, Page 25 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/feb2002/news_web.htm
Intro to
Bankruptcy Law
www.bankruptcylawinstitute.com
This site offers information on Chapter
7, Chapter 11 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy law, forms and court
filing procedures. Users can access online tutorials on the
following topics: types of bankruptcy, the structure of bankruptcy
law, exemption and property law, and how to calculate equity.
Bankruptcy-Law
Links
www.agin.com/lawfind
The law firm Swiggart & Agin, LLC, in
Boston hosts the Bankruptcy Lawfinder, offering users related
information and resources. Site sections include courts and cases,
regulations and statutes. The bankruptcy law resources section
includes links to the American Bankruptcy Institute, a directory
of companies in Chapter 11 proceedings and the Center for Debt
Management.
Peachtree Accounting has a short new name and huge new prices
"Sticker Shock Awaits Sage 50/Peachtree Payroll Service Users,"
by David Ringstrom, AccountingWeb, April 16, 2013 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/sticker-shock-awaits-sage-50peachtree-payroll-service-users/221587?source=technology
The 2014 version of Sage 50, formerly
known as Peachtree Accounting, is available for purchase now. As
a result, certain users who rely on the payroll subscription are
going to experience sticker shock in the near future.
Historically, you could purchase a Sage 50/Peachtree Accounting
product and pay an additional fee for the annual payroll service
that makes it easy to calculate withholding taxes. As long as
your accounting software was one of the three most recent
versions, the annual payroll service typically cost around
$300/year. Such users are about to see their annual costs
increase by a factor of two, three, or even more.
For several years, Sage has offered an
optional Business Care program that entitled users to priority
support and automatic program upgrades. This program is now
mandatory if you want to process payroll in the software. The
Sage Business Care program is being offered at three levels:
Silver Gold Platinum
The Silver plan offers unlimited
support, annual product upgrades, and the Business Intelligence
feature that allows you to analyze your accounting data in
Microsoft Excel. However, if you wish to process payroll within
Sage 50, you must sign up for the Gold or Platinum programs. The
Gold program allows you to process payroll for up to fifty
users, while the Platinum program offers unlimited payroll as
well as priority access to a dedicated support team that offers
appointment scheduling.
Business Care is an annual
subscription, which means that rather than buying the software
and sitting out a couple of upgrade cycles, you must continue
your Business Care subscription year after year in order to
process payroll in Sage 50.
Sage doesn't disclose pricing for the
Gold or Platinum programs on its website, because the pricing
varies based on which version of Peachtree/Sage 50 you're
currently using and the number of simultaneous users you
require. In general, the first year of business care will be at
a higher price, with savings each year for annual consecutive
renewals. As a point of reference, a Silver Business Care
subscription for a three-user license for Peachtree Complete
Accounting is $669/year. This doesn't include payroll, so it
means your ongoing annual expense will likely be at least
$800/year, year-in, year-out, as opposed to the $300 or so that
you could formerly pay to add a payroll subscription.
Continued in article
There is a somewhat useful 2011 Peachtree versus Quickbooks site at
http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/accounting/peachtree-vs-quickbooks-1062211/
Pricing comparisons before April 2013 are probably out of date.
Bob Jensen's Threads on Professional Practice,
Fees, Choosing Accountants, Financial Advisors, and Consultants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm
www.legal-definitions.com
CPAs who need help deciphering “lawyerspeak” can
find concise definitions of legal terminology at this e-stop as well
as the meaning of general business terms such as bankruptcy.
www.commerce-database.com
Need to know the difference between an act of
God and an act of nature? The legal terms section of
this online business dictionary defines them as one and the same.
The Commerce Database categorizes words into separate business and
legal dictionaries: The business one offers categories such as
accounting.
www.legal-database.com
CPAs interested in legal topics such as bankruptcy,
civil rights, employment, labor and tax laws can find various terms
explained in the articles section for each category at this Web
stop. In addition visitors can register for free monthly newsletters
on bankruptcy, employment, family and tax law.
See also
Small Business Helpers
Fees and Professionalism
Message from FERF on February 24, 2004
Auditor
Fees
An FEI
member recently asked research as to whether a database exists
of how much audit firms charge in audit fees relative to size of
clients and billable rates per hour.
FERF
researchers found information broken down by company size in the
recent FEI Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 survey results issued
earlier in February
http://www.fei.org/news/404_survey.cfm.
Although billable rates are not given, an excel table details
incremental audit fees for the Section 404 attestation and the %
increase this fee represents of their current audit fee. Various
groupings of responses are given by size of company based on
revenue.
In
April 2003, FEI's Committee on Corporate Reporting (CCR)
surveyed its members on 2002 audit fees. Twenty-five companies
with total US assets of between $0.4 billion and $1,097 billion
responded. Findings and an excel table are available under
Finance Tools at
http://www.fei.org/financetools/audit_fee.cfm
Aspen
Publishing recently released the 5th edition of
"Professionals Guide to Value Pricing." The book
discusse related value pricing vs. audit firm hourly rates. A
description of the book can be found at:
http://www.aspenpublishers.com/Product.asp?catalog%5Fname=Aspen&category%5Fname=&product%5Fid=0735543178&Mode=SEARCH&ProductType=M.
Bob Jensen's guides to fees and related matters
are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm
-
Services Offered by Professional
Accounting Firms (including how to find them) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm#ServicesOffered
From Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, July 2007 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jul2007/news_web.htm
|
WEALTH MANAGEMENT |
|
SECURING A REPUTABLE BROKER
www.nasd.com/brokercheck
The NASD has answered the calls of investors looking for
background information on potential financial service
providers. The organization’s BrokerCheck Program lets
users research current or formerly registered securities
firms, individual brokers and regulated Investment
Adviser firms. It also provides a comprehensive 10-year
business and licensure history and list of disclosure
events, including criminal actions, customer complaints
and disciplinary actions by regulators against the firm
or broker. Investors receive an electronic disclosure
report as well as access to other educational services,
including the Professional Designation Database and
state disclosure programs.
BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH…MORE
www.freemoneyfinance.com
Whether you’re living on a student’s budget or a CFO’s
salary, Free Money Finance has innovative ideas for
increasing net worth, budgeting and maximizing
retirement savings that you can immediately put into
practice. On Mondays, check out “Star Money Articles,” a
posting of news and tips from several of the Web’s
popular personal finance sites. Take a few minutes on
Fridays to read “One Year Ago,” popular posts from the
prior year, to jump-start a frugal weekend.
THE
BENEFITS OF TAX KNOWLEDGE
www.irs.gov/retirement
Visit this Smart Stop for the
latest tax news and information affecting the employee
plans community. CPAs can search for resources on
employee plans (EP) examinations and enforcement,
retirement plans, benefit audits and correcting EP
errors. Click on the “EP/Forms/Pubs/Products” link for
access to PDF versions of EP forms and publications,
plus in-depth instructions for form 5500, Annual
Return/Report of Employee Benefit Plan, and form
5330, Return of Excise Taxes Related to Employee
Benefit Plans.
NOTHING IS
CERTAIN BUT…
www.deathandtaxesblog.com
Visit Chicago-area attorney Joel
Schoenmeyer’s Web site to brush up on topics straddling
the lines between law, accounting and wealth management.
Death and Taxes—The Blog offers estate planning and
administration news and commentary, plus coverage of
legal issues about real estate, gift and income taxes,
trusts and charitable giving. |
Bob Jensen's investment helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#Markets
Audit Analytics
---
http://www.auditanalytics.com/0002/
A Premium Audit Industry Market
Intelligence Service Audit Analytics has information on over 20,000
public registrants and over 1,500 audit firms. It is the most
comprehensive market intelligence tool for the audit industry
available today. AuditAnalytics.com currently offers over 60 data
fields to its users. Access to this data is available as on-line
user subscriptions, as enterprise data feed subscriptions, and in
custom reports.
The FBI's Internet Fraud and Complaint
Center (IFCC FBI)
To thwart fraud on the Internet and terror in general, check in
and/or report to
http://www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp
- Bob Jensen's Threads on Accounting
Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
Message from FERF on February 24, 2004
Fraud
Checklists
Another
FEI member responsible for a Sarbanes-Oxley 404 engagement
recently inquired about a "checklist that can be used at
the process level to help identify the types of fraud concerns
related to a specific process."
FERF
researchers found the following references:
An
Appendix to Statement on Auditing Standards No. 99,
Consideration of Fraud in a Financial Statement Audit (SAS 99),
provides examples of fraud risk factors. The appendix is
available at the AICPA website at:
http://www.aicpa.org/antifraud/business_industry_govt/assessing_organization_vulnerability/identify_assess_risk/38.htm
The
Association of Certified Fraud Examiners provides a fraud
prevention checkup that can be used to assist in determining an
"entity's vulnerability to fraud."
http://www.cfenet.com/pdfs/FrdPrevCheckUp.pdf
In
January 2003, the Institute of Internal Auditors conducted a
survey on red flags used to detect fraud. Though the survey is
closed, the text can be used as a checklist.
http://www.gain2.org/redflags.htm
Somewhat
related to the issue of fraud, Mutual Interest published an
article about SAS 99 and fraud:
http://www.auditnet.org/articles/SAS%2099%20Friend%20or%20Foe.PDF
FERF
also wrote an article on fraud detection that will be published
in the March/April 2004 issue of FE Magazine that will soon be
available at
http://www.fei.org/mag/.
Bob Jensen's main fraud links are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
-
Services Offered by Professional
Accounting Firms (including how to find them) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm#ServicesOffered
-
-
A great listing of URLs of companies selling
accounting systems software.
http://www.lib.polyu.edu.hk/electdb/DATAPRO/154-1.htm
Bob Jensen's AIS course ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/acct5342.htm
SQL Ledger ---
http://www.sql-ledger.org/
other
-
-
Application Development Trends
SAP Homepage (Accounting Information Systems)
Microsoft Access Accounting Systems
-
Application Development Trends
(Information Systems, Databases)
ACCT 5342 Accounting Inrformation Systems
(Includes ACCESS links)
-
QueryTool (Databases, ODBC)
-
SnmpQL SQL Examples
-
Index of
/~jbarlow/dbclass/fall.95/ SQL examples/
-
InterBase SQL GROUP
BY
-
CS 265 - SQL
Examples MS Assexx
-
Technical Glossary
@IceNH
-
Microsoft Access
Health Care Solutions
-
A Metalanguage for
Describing Internet Resources
-
SAP R/3 Design Center [SAP]
PriceWaterhouse Coopers
-
DatatelHome Page
-
EDUCATIONSYSTEMS (SCT Education and Accounting
Information Systems)
-
CARSInformation Systems
-
PeopleSoft:Meet PeopleSoft
-
ASU
-
-
http://www.public.asu.edu/~cpaul/
-
Julie Smith David Homepage
-
ACC330: Accounting Information Systems at
Arizona State University
-
COURSE TECHNOLOGY
-
Joseph H. Callaghan, Thomas W. Lauer, and Eileen
Peacock
Oakland University's School of Business Administration
An AIS Curriculum Using a Model-Oriented, Tool-Enhanced (MOTE) Framework
See
http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/facdev/teaching/submissions/callaghan.htm
The innovation consists of a curriculum, instructional strategy,
teaching approach, and a set of related teaching materials. Evidence of this
implemented innovation is composed of the following:
- An
Executive
Summary
- Several articles describing the innovation and its foundation
elements
- Attestations from academics, students, practitioners, and
employers
- Course syllabi for the three courses in the curriculum:
ACC 418/618, Computerized Accounting Information Systems
ACC 419/619, Accounting Information Systems: Design
ACC 480/680, Special Topics in Accounting Information Systems
- Examples of course materials used in the curriculum
- Data Modeling Case example Business Process Case example Sy's Fish
Case example PLACE Case
At its core, the MOTE approach aims to teach conceptual
understanding and skills in data and process modeling in an accounting context. Learning
these skills on a conceptual level is reinforced through the use of programmer development
software. These are software tools that support systems development from the model level
during systems analysis, through systems design, and to the completion of the development
life cycle and the construction of the system. The first two courses of our AIS curriculum
roughly follow these three phases, while the third course reiterates these phases in a
complex accounting context. For further information, see the
Executive
Summary for the innovation at
http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/Callaghan/aisaward/AAA%20MOTE%20award.html
-
-
ACCT 5342 Accounting
Inrformation Systems
-
AAA IS/MAS Homepage
Study Web
-
http://www.isworld.org/isworld.html
-
Ernie. Your online business consultant.
-
Frank G. Duserick
(MIS and AIS Courses)
-
Darrell Walden at U.
of Richmond - Accounting Information Systems
-
Univeristy of
Waterloo - School of Accountancy - J.E. Boritz
-
AC3029 Accounting
Information Systems (AIS)
-
AAA IS/MAS Homepage
-
Ceil M. Pillsbury
-
AIS OnLine
-
EdWeb Home Page (Education, Recommended
by Ceil Pillsbury)
-
||-- webprofessor Amelia Baldwin at
Florida International University (Acccounting Information Systems)
-
Favorite Sites --
Accounting, AIS & MIS Students & Professionals
-
Here's Ernie
-
http://WWW.raptor.com/library/nstiss.glo.txt
-
Raptor Systems Security Library
-
SMAP 96 Homepage
-
The School of Information Systems
-
Infobyte Homepage
-
Infobyte Homepage (General Ledger,
Accounitng Education Site)
-
ISACA - Information Systems Audit and
Control Association (Accounting Information Systems)
-
Favorite Sites --
Accounting, AIS & MIS Students & Professionals (Shared Course Materials)
-
Favorite Sites --
Accounting, AIS & MIS Students & Professionals (Accounting and AIS Links)
-
Association for Information Systems
-
http://www.isworld.org/isworld.html
-
Datatel Home Page
-
Datatel : Products
(Microcosm Authoring Software)
-
Microsoft's COM
(Component Object Model)
-
InfobyteHomepage (Accounting, General Ledger Software)
-
AuditNet: Internet Resources for Auditors
-
Ernie. Your online business consultant.
-
AC3029Accounting
Systems
-
KenyonCollege - Academic Projects on the Kenyon Web
-
Chapters (Internet Guide for Accountants
by Kogan, Sudit, and Vasarhelyi)
The AIS/ICIS Placement Listings
-
OSU
-
-
AMIS Faculty Home
Pages
-
-
In the Classroom
-
-
Waleed Muhanna's
Home Page
-
Learning Insights (includes CFA paractice questions)
-
"Distance learning: The world of online training for
accountants," AccountingWeb, December 2007 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=103948
From Smart Stops on the Web,
Journal of Accountancy, November 2007 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov2007/smart_stops.htm
|
CONTINUING EDUCATION |
|
THE CPA
TOOLBOX
www.cpemarket.com
This Smart Stop is part of the National Association of State Boards
of Accountancy’s
www.nasbatools.com, which offers “tools for accountancy
compliance.” CPAs can search CPE course providers, the National
Registry of CPE Sponsor courses and quality assurance service
courses, plus click on “Pilot Test CPE Courses” to try out courses
for free. There’s also access to instructor resumes and in-house
course providers. Click on the state you’re licensed in to find
updated information on mandated continuing education requirements
and links to your state’s board of accountancy.
CREDITS ON THE GO
www.cchpodcast.com/partners/cchPodcast
Check this site for free CPE podcasts, available as streaming audio
or downloadable to your computer or audio player. Click on “Course
Catalog” to download available podcasts and their supplementary PDFs,
including a study guide and final exam questions. When you’re ready
to take the exam, enroll and purchase the credits—your exam grading
and certification is available immediately. Be sure to check if your
state’s board of accountancy accepts these CCH self-study courses by
clicking the “CPE Accreditation” link.
ASSESS YOURSELF
www.cpa2biz.com/CPE
Just starting your continuing education requirements? Test your
skills and training needs with the site’s “Competency
Self-Assessment Tool,” free for AICPA members, then search CPE
courses by topic, level, job area or format, including CD-ROM and
DVD. Check back often to see the month’s top sellers and new
releases or to download catalogs for the “CPE Direct” program and
“Staff Training Series.”
THE ROAD TO CPE COMPLIANCE
www.cpetracking.com
Can’t keep up with your CPE hours? Launched in 2006, this site keeps
accounting professionals and firms up-to-date on CPE hours and
compliance. Registered users can record CPE credits, which are then
compared to the requirements from each state’s board of accountancy
and regulatory agencies. The service also provides status reports by
jurisdiction and reporting period, as well as access to all of your
CPE records in one location.
|
Most accountancy associations,
firms, and many colleges also offer CPE courses.
Bob Jensen's threads on online training and
education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
-
Richard
Torian's Managerial Accounting Information Center --- http://www.informationforaccountants.com/
O'Keefe Accounting Library Searches
http://library.sau.edu/bestinfo/Majors/Accnt/accindex.htm
Services Offered by Professional
Accounting Firms (including how to find them) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm#ServicesOffered
Bob Jensen's Threads on Accounting Fraud, Forensic
Accounting, Securities Fraud, and White Collar Crime --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads
on Fees and Choosing Accountants, Financial Advisors, and
Consultants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm
- Accounting Professional Site
Links
The CPA Team
http://www.cpateam.com/
-
- CPAnet
http://www.cpanet.com/index.asp
-
Accountants
Directory - Database Search
THE LIST of CPA Firms
Welcome to NACUBO!
- Gerald Trite's great
set of links ---
http://iago.stfx.ca/people/gtrites/Docs/bookmark.htm
-
- AccountingWEB's Entrepreneur to Accountant Referral Network
(E.A.R.N.) program, matching the accounting and financial
needs of thousands of small businesses with the talent of the
AccountingWEB community.
http://www.accountingweb.com/item/39161
-
- Bob Jensen's Links
- American Association of Hispanic Certified Public
Accountants --- http://www.aahcpa.org/
-
Jensen & Sandlin Survey of U.S.
Accountancy Education Programs
-
E. Barry Rice, Loyola College in Maryland
-
ANet Home Page
ANet Australia home (International Accounting Network)
-
Wm. Dennis Huber's
Web Page
-
RAW Rutgers
Accounting Web Introduction
Locate a Lawyer with lawyers.com!
Information Systems Audit and Control Association and
Foundation Web (ISACA) site ---
http://www.isaca.org/
Professor Durler has a nice links page at
http://www.emporia.edu/~durlerge/links.htm
Public Accounting Report
has published its annual ranking of America's Top 100 Accounting
Firms, and it's no surprise that Andersen, last year's number five
ranked firm, is no longer on the list.
http://www.accountingweb.com/item/95611
- PricewaterhouseCoopers:
$8,056.5 million
- Deloitte
& Touche: $6,130 million
- Ernst
& Young: $4,485 million
- KPMG:
$3,171 million
- Grant
Thornton: $432.5 million
- BDO
Seidman: $353 million
- BKD:
$210.9 million
- Crowe,
Chizek & Co.: $204.7 million
- McGladrey
& Pullen: $203 million
- Moss
Adams: $163 million
"Second Six: Ready to Step Up?" CFO.com ---
http://www.cfo.com/specialreport/0,5487,564||A,00.html
As contributing editor Ed Zwirn reveals
in his article ''The
Second Six: Ready to Step Up?'', the demise of Andersen
and the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley have not been an unqualified
blessing for those firms that remain. And in ''Same
Straw, Smaller Back,'' Zwirn notes how new regulatory
burdens that fall heavily on smaller companies (the usual Group
B clients) may persuade many of them to go private.
The American Bar
Association is Giving Something Away for Free
ABA LawInfo.org ---
http://www.abalawinfo.org/
Your gateway to information on legal
topics that affect your daily life.
From the Scout Report --- Business.com
http://www.business.com/
The owners of this lucrative URL
address have sponsored a Web directory created by a "team
of 50 research analysts [that] has sifted through the Web to
find relevant sites for our handcrafted Directory." All
Websites in this 30-category directory have been annotated. The
annotations, however, tend to be very terse and a bit vague.
First time users are encouraged to skim over the excellent site
guide, which gives a step-by-step manual for using the site as
well as in-depth explanations of the terminology and taxonomy.
-
The National Network
of Accountants homepage is at
http://www.nnaplan.com/
AAA
-
-
American Accounting
Association (AAA)
Accounting
Coursepage Exchange (ACE) - American Accounting Association (AAA)
Teaching and
Curriculum Section Home Page
-
Public Interest
Section of the AAA
-
AAA IS/MAS Homepage
Globalization Strategic Alliances
Roundtable (GSAR), Berlin, Germany, June 22, 2001 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/GSAR2001/000start.htm
AICPA
-
- e-Commerce and e-Business Helpers for Accountants
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm
-
AICPA American Institute of Certified
Public Accountants
AICPA Journal of Accountancy
AICPA The Vision Process
-
AICPA AICPA Code of
Professional Conduct
-
AICPA NewsFlash! - 9/16/97 - AICPA
Launches CPA WebTrust Electronic Commerce Seal
-
AICPAAICPA
Implementation Initiatives on SAS No. 82
-
AICPARecently-Issued
Auditing Standards and Interpretations
-
AICPAOnline Policies and Copyright Information
-
AICPAHome Page
-
CPAtechonline: Tech News
(Accounting, Auditing, Tax, Computers, AIS)
-
PronouncementsHaving Current and Future Effective Dates
-
AICPA AICPA Online Audio/Video Library
-
EAA
-
-
European
Accounting Association Home Page
EAA 96 Complete
Index of papers
-
Index of EAA 96 by
Theme Reference - ATH
-
IASB (formerley
IASC)
-
-
IASB - Web Site
The IASB announced that international accounting IASC standards will now be available on
CD-ROM at http://www.iasc.org.uk/news/cen8_065.htm
.
IYou may also try
http://extranet.pw.com/PWRUpdates.htm
-
IOSCO Home Page
-
IFAC
IFAC - International
Federation of Accountants
The Internet and Distance Learning in Accounting Education—IFAC
International standards are also available along with accounting and auditing standards in
various nations are also available on the PriceWaterhouse Coopers
Compario at
http://www.pwcglobal.com/gx/eng/about/svcs/comperio/
FASB
-
FASB Home Page
International standards are also available along with accounting and auditing standards in
various nations are also available on the PriceWaterhouse Coopers
Compario at
http://www.pwcglobal.com/gx/eng/about/svcs/comperio/
-
There are no free copies of any FASB standards, because sales
of those standards are main sources of revenue to the FASB. My
advice is to contact Pricewaterhouse Coopers and subscribe to
their PW Researcher that contains all standards for a number of
nations, the IASC international standards, and all FASB
standards. You can get this on the PW Researcher CD-ROM that is
updated as new standards and interpretations come along. FAS 52
is one of those standards. One website for the PW Researcher
is
http://instruction.bus.wisc.edu/jfuhrmann/pwr/PW%20Researcher%20Guidelines.html
You might also
try
http://extranet.pw.com/PWRUpdates.htm
The other alternative is to order FASB standards directly
from the FASB at
http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/public/index.html
-
Others
-
-
ACBSP Association of Collegiate Business
Schools and Programs
-
Associated Colleges of the South (ACS)
Palladian Fall 1998
-
Accounting Related
Resources
- American Association of Hispanic Certified Public
Accountants --- http://www.aahcpa.org/
The Institute of Chartered
Accountants in England and Wales Links Page
http://www.icaew.co.uk/link.ht
- International standards are also available along with accounting and auditing standards in
various nations are also available on the PriceWaterhouse Coopers
Compario at
http://www.pwcglobal.com/gx/eng/about/svcs/comperio/
-
-
Jensen & Sandlin Survey of U.S. Accountancy Education
Programs
-
The Institute of Internal Auditors
(IIA)
Internal Auditing World Wide Web (IAWWW)
-
Associationof Certified Fraud Examiners Home Page
The Institute of Financial Accountants (United Kingdom)
-
Prologueto Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and
Abuse (President Clinton)
-
AACSB Home Page
ACBSP (Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs )
Palladian Fall 1998
-
Association of Collegiate Business
Schools and Programs (ACBSP)
-
Associated Colleges of the South
-
ACCOUNTING RESOURCES
ON INTERNET
-
AICPA Home Page
-
American Accounting
Association Homepage
-
AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION
-
Arizona Society of CPAs
-
Center for
Educational Technology (CETA)
-
Certified Management Accountants (Canada)
-
CPA WIRE - home page for the California
Society of CPAs
-
Global Window Main
Menu (Business Schools and Culture of Japan)
-
Illinois CPA Society Members Home Page
-
Institute of
Management Accountants (IMA) ---
http://www.imanet.org/
-
MACPA Online
-
MNCPA
-
National Society of Accountants
(Association)
-
Oklahoma Society of CPAs
-
PICPA - Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs
-
Professional Associations Site Seeker
-
The IIA Home Page
-
The Ohio Society of CPAs
-
TSCPA
-
Upcoming Workshops
(ACS Associated Colleges of the South)
-
Utah Association of CPAs
-
CPA Online: Your source for Accounting
Information on the Internet
-
Career Bookmarks and
Threads
Accounting News, Blogs, Tweets,
etc. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Academic careers
--- http://www.academiccareers.com/
LibraryCareers.org ---
http://www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/careers/librarycareerssite/home.cfm
Careerzone ---
http://careerzone.ny.gov/cz/stem/index.jsp
-
JobApps ---
http://www.myjobapps.com/
Resume Writing Helpers and
Samples --- http://www.resumesamples.info/
Science Careers ---
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/
Accounting Career Network ---
http://www.searchaccountingjobs.com/
AccountingCareersNow.com ---
http://www.accountingcareersnow.com/
The Big Four Accounting Firms Are All in the Ten: Who dares say
that accounting is a dull career?
"Fifty Most Popular Employers for Business Students," Bloomberg
Businessweek, May 9, 2013 ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2013-05-09/fifty-most-popular-employers-for-business-students
Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Is Law School Worth It?" by Adam Freedman, Legal Aid, February
22, 2013 ---
http://legallad.quickanddirtytips.com/is-law-school-worth-it.aspx
The Smart Grid For Institutions of Higher Education And The
Students They Serve (career in science inspirations and preparation)
---
http://php.aaas.org/programs/centers/capacity/documents/SmartGrid.pdf
$53,300: The Average Starting Salary for New Accounting Grads
(in 2013) ---
http://www.naceweb.com/salary-survey-data/?referal=research&menuID=71&nodetype=4
Jensen Comment
I think such starting salary surveys are highly misleading unless they
also show cost of living adjustments. A starting salary of $53,300 will
go a lot further in San Antonio than in San Francisco, NYC, Los Angeles,
and Honolulu where people earning $53,300 should probably get food
stamps and subsidized housing.
I would go to work for $20,000 if the starting job had world class
training and exposures to clients thirsting to hire away CPAs from top
accounting firms.
It's all about windows of opportunity that trump starting salaries in
nearly every instance.
I would not opt for an MBA program were graduates have average
starting salaries of $143,800 (and a high standard deviation and
kurtosis) relative to a Masters of Accounting Program where average
starting salaries are $53,300 with a small standard deviation and
negligible kurtosis. By kurtosis I mean that a few superstar graduates
(such as those with whiz-kid computer science undergraduate degrees from
elite universities) with starting salaries over $250,000 are skewing the
average.
There are also misleading "expected" compensations contingent upon
such things as sales. For example, a marketing or finance job may look
great when told that last year's hires earned an average of $143,800
with commissions and bonuses thrown in. But what about those that came
in below average because they just had a harder time selling products
and services?
Please warn students that the most important thing about a new job is
not the anticipated salary. It's the anticipated opportunity with a few
other factors thrown in such as tension, long hours, geographic
location, and constant travel. For example, a CPA firm may pay double
for going to Moscow, but do you really want to start your career in
Moscow where it's really dangerous on the streets and housing is rather
Spartan?
$53,300: The Average Starting Salary for New Accounting Grads
---
http://www.naceweb.com/salary-survey-data/?referal=research&menuID=71&nodetype=4
Jensen Comment
I think such starting salary surveys are highly misleading unless they
also show cost of living adjustments. A starting salary of $53,300 will
go a lot further in San Antonio than in San Francisco, NYC, Los Angeles,
and Honolulu where people earning $53,300 should probably get food
stamps and subsidized housing.
I would go to work for $20,000 if the starting job had world class
training and exposures to clients thirsting to hire away CPAs from top
accounting firms.
It's all about windows of opportunity that trump starting salaries in
nearly every instance.
I would not opt for an MBA program were graduates have average
starting salaries of $143,800 (and a high standard deviation and
kurtosis) relative to a Masters of Accounting Program where average
starting salaries are $53,300 with a small standard deviation and
negligible kurtosis. By kurtosis I mean that a few superstar graduates
(such as those with whiz-kid computer science undergraduate degrees from
elite universities) with starting salaries over $250,000 are skewing the
average.
There are also misleading "expected" compensations contingent upon
such things as sales. For example, a marketing or finance job may look
great when told that last year's hires earned an average of $143,800
with commissions and bonuses thrown in. But what about those that came
in below average because they just had a harder time selling products
and services?
Please warn students that the most important thing about a new job is
not the anticipated salary. It's the anticipated opportunity with a few
other factors thrown in such as tension, long hours, geographic
location, and constant travel. For example, a CPA firm may pay double
for going to Moscow, but do you really want to start your career in
Moscow where it's really dangerous on the streets and housing is rather
Spartan?
The downloadable Robert Half salary guide ---.
http://www.roberthalf.com/SalaryGuide
Deloitte (DTTL) and the International Association for Accounting
Education and Research (IAAER) today announced the Deloitte IAAER
Scholarship Programme, naming five associate professors from Brazil,
Indonesia, Poland, Romania and South Africa as the programme’s inaugural
scholars.
IAS Plus
February 13, 2013
http://www.iasplus.com/en/news/2013/02/deloitte-scholars
Mentors will be assigned to each scholar to
support them as they increase their exposure to internationally
recognised accounting scholars, best practices in accounting and
business education and research, and a global peer network.
Ongoing mentorship is a critical element of
the Deloitte IAAER Scholarship Programme and some well-known and
highly accomplished accounting experts have volunteered their
support. These include former member of the Financial Accounting
Standards Board, Katherine Schipper (Duke University); former member
of the International Accounting Standards Board, Mary Barth
(Stanford University); Chika Saka (Kwansei Gakuin University);
Sidney Gray (University of Sydney); and Ann Tarca (University of
Western Australia).
The scholars, who must be a sitting
lecturer, assistant, or associate professor holding a PhD (or
comparable degree) in a faculty that teaches accounting, auditing,
or financial reporting, are chosen for three years and attend IAAER
co-sponsored conferences, workshops, and consortia as well as the
IAAER World Congress.
In the long term, the programme aims at
supporting better accounting education and improving the quality of
financial reporting and auditing. The next round of scholarships
will open in 2016, with applications considered in 2015.
Bob Jensen's helpers for accounting educators ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/default3.htm
Bob Jensen's helpers for accounting researchers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/default4.htm
Bob Jensen's threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Applicants for academic jobs, particularly
in the humanities, know instinctively—and by the job offers that never
materialize—that they face tough competition in trying to get
tenure-track positions. And when the odds are sometimes as high as
600 to one, as they were for a recent opening for assistant
professor in the department of political science at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, candidates have no way of knowing exactly whom
they are up against or how they stack up.
"The Long Odds of the Faculty Job Search," by Audrey Williams
June, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Long-Odds-of-the/139361/?cid=wb
Bob Jensen compares (with data) searching for an accounting
faculty position versus a history faculty position at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#HistoryVsAccountancy
"Job Interview Questions That Will Catch You Off Guard," by Marissa
Brassfield, Payscale, March 12, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.payscale.com/salary_report_kris_cowan/2013/03/job-interview-questions-that-will-catch-you-off-guard.html?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=0313_newsletter_02&utm_term=http%3a%2f%2fblogs.payscale.com%2fsalary_report_kris_cowan%2f2013%2f03%2fjob-interview-questions-that-will-catch-you-off-guard.html&cm_mmc=Email-_-0313_newsletter_02-_-NA-_-http%3a%2f%2fblogs.payscale.com%2fsalary_report_kris_cowan%2f2013%2f03%2fjob-interview-questions-that-will-catch-you-off-guard.html
Job interview questions are often standard,
allowing you to prepare all your answers before you meet with your
new potential employer. But some companies like to ask questions
that throw you completely off-guard.
Randy Garutti, the CEO of burger franchise
Shake Shack, asks potential new employees to predict the future: "If
we're sitting here a year from now celebrating what a great year
it's been for you in this role, what did we achieve together?"
Garutti says the point of this question is to see if interviewees
have done their homework. In fact, he actually wants them to
interview him. "The candidate should have enough strategic vision to
not only talk about how good the year has been but to answer with an
eye towards that bigger-picture understanding of the company."
Meanwhile, Ryan Holmes, the CEO of social
media tool HootSuite, wants candidates to use their imaginations. He
often asks, "What's your superpower? and "What's your spirit
animal?" His current executive assistant answered the second
question, saying a duck because they seem calm, but underneath the
surface they are always moving. "I think this was an amazing
response and a perfect description for the role of an EA," Holmes
says.
The CEO of recruiting software Bullhorn,
Art Papas, already knows a lot about finding the right candidates,
so he asks a question that most employers never think about: "What
things do you not like to do?" Papas says it often takes a few tries
before an interviewee is willing to answer honestly, but the answer
reveals a lot about candidates and shows if they are really cut out
for the job.
Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner and Le
Bernardin in New York City, likes to keep the creative process going
in job interviews. He looks for certain characteristics like
discipline and passion by making the interview more of a
conversation. "I ask indirect questions about the creative process,
about articulating and demystifying the process of creating great
food and great service. Then I trust my instincts," he says.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
My economist colleague, Bill Breit, always like to ask:
"If you could have a long private dinner with any person living or dead,
who would you choose and why?"
The important answer is not so much who but why.
Accounting professor Joe Hoyle likes to ask:
"What is the best book you ever read?"
"What Is the Best Book You Ever Read?" by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Blog, June 23, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-is-best-book-you-ever-read.html
Jensen Comment
Firstly I don't like this question because many readers who answer this
question, especially in public, will be trying to say something about
themselves instead of the book. To your Mom and your kids, the best book
you ever read had better be The Bible or The Quran.
To your blog audience the best book you ever read from cover to cover
had better be Toynbee's ten-volume set ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee
Secondly, such a question should be asked in one of a hundred or more
contexts. What is the best book you ever read in accounting history,
financial accounting, cost accounting, tax accounting, accounting
information systems, history of computing, learning and cognition, etc.
What is the best mystery novel you've ever read, the best romantic
novel you ever read, the best biography you ever read, and on and on and
on.
Beware of those oral interviews when applying for a job or college
admission or membership in an exclusive club. Be prepared for those
trick questions such as the examples given below:
- What is your all-time favorite book?
- What are the best three books you ever read? (don't overlook the
autobiography of the founder of the company or university)
- If you could've had an intimate dinner with three people, living
or dead who would you choose and why? (this demands creative
thought)
- Who was your favorite K-12 teacher and why?
- Who was your favorite athletic coach and why?
- Who was your was your favorite college professor and why?
- Who was your least favorite college professor and why?
- Who is your favorite active in an academic blog and why?
- Who is your favorite active in a non-academic blog and why?
- Who is your favorite blogger in the NYT, the WSJ, the New
Yorker, the Economist, MSNBC, CNBC, the Nation, and on
and on and on?
- If you have online debates, who is your favorite antagonist and
why?
- If you have online debates, who is your favorite protagonist and
why?
- Who is your favorite intellectual progressive?
- Who is your favorite intellectual conservative?
In the end the choices at the top and bottom of your lists on most
any topic are just too close together to rank. And your choices are not
locked in time or place.
Conclusion
Of course my favorite set of books is Toynbee's ten-volume set.
Oops! Sorry Mom, I overlooked The Bible.
"Tax Professionals Will
Continue To Be in Great Demand for Years," by Frank Byrt,
AccountingWeb, March 3, 2013 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/tax-professionals-will-continue-be-great-demand-years/221256?source=education
Demand for Accounting Graduates Among the Highest of All Disciplines
"CPAs are sexy: Accountants in demand as regulatory climate
tightens," Boston Business Journal, January 14, 2013 ---
http://www.masslive.com/business-news/index.ssf/2013/01/cpas_are_sexy_accountants_in_demand_as_r.html
The numbers are in, and accountants should
be smiling.
The unemployment rate for accountants
stands at just 4.1 percent. And
Forbes.com
recently listed accountants and auditors at
No. 2 on its list of Top Jobs for 2013, just behind software
developers.
Meanwhile, the Class of 2012 Student Survey
Report, released last year by the
National Association of Colleges & Employers,
found that 68 percent of the most recent
accounting majors received job offers, the highest percentage of any
major.
“The job demand is there, and it’s steady,”
said Barbara Iannoni, academic/career development specialist at the
Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants Inc.
In fact, demand for accounting
professionals has picked up and continues to strengthen, said Bill
Driscoll, the New England District president for staffing firm
Robert Half International. And Driscoll says the demand for new
talent is coming from all areas.
“It’s private industry, it’s public, it’s
really across the board. You don’t have to be in a CPA to be in
demand,” he said. “It’s accounting that’s in demand right now. You
can be a comptroller, financial analyst, or auditor without being a
CPA.”
Driscoll said that for applicants with a
mix of public and private company experience — something most CPAs
have — the job opportunities are even more plentiful.
“In the economic environment we still find
ourselves in, anyone in the accounting department who can analyze
where the dollars go, who can help companies stretch every dollar,
are in high demand,” he said.
Nonetheless, companies today still have
high expectations for those they hire; they want accountants who
know more than numbers, Driscoll said.
“Everybody needs number crunchers, but
particularly with the events of the last four or five years, if you
can blend communication skills and leadership skills with accounting
skills or a CPA, that will open up all sorts of opportunities and
career progressions for you,” he said.
Industry leaders said most college students
on the accounting track still aim to get a CPA designation, which
requires meeting state-set academic and experience requirements as
well as passing a one-time state-administered CPA test. Once
certified, a CPA also must meet regular licensing requirements.
It’s no easy process. According to Scott
Moore, senior manager of the College and University Initiatives at
the
American Institute of CPAs, only 40
percent of test takers nationwide actually pass.
“It shows a lot of dedication and
self-discipline to pass the exam. That really tells you something
about the person,” Moore said.
That’s one of the reasons the CPA remains
such a hot commodity in the job market, he said.
Another reason: the ever-expanding list of
regulations that companies face. It’s a state of affairs that took a
big leap forward in 2002 with the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010, which is still being
phased in through dozens of yet-to-be-written regulations, has only
made CPAs all the more valuable, Moore said.
“The work that a CPA does has evolved.
There’s not so much a need to do hard core number crunching because
(computers) can do that, so it’s more interpretation versus creation
of information, and that interpretation is more important to the
business. CPAs have really taken on that role,” said Moore, noting
that CPAs are increasingly filling a number of C-level positions at
major companies.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are some caveats. Undergraduate accounting majors must now take a
fifth year or more (most enter masters degree programs) in order to sit
for the Uniform National CPA Examination. And starting salaries are
lower than salaries of engineers.
And most graduates going to work for CPA firms have a low probability
of surviving in those firms after 5-10 years. But this is not usually
too bothersome since the main reason many accounting graduates first
enter public accounting is for the great training and client exposures.
Most of them did not want to stay in public accounting because of the
requisite travel, long hours, and performance pressures. Those that
leave public accounting after a few years go with clients who offer 9-5
hours, less travel, and much less pressure. And many leave to become
full-time parents between the early parts and late parts of their
accounting careers.
The bummer is that corporations fail offer nearly as many entry-level
jobs as public accounting firms. Corporations and agencies like the FBI
prefer to hire job applicants with some years of accounting experience.
Aside from public accounting, the IRS is one of the best sources of
entry-level job applications. And both the training and experience in
the IRS are excellent for changing jobs later on.
National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) ---
http://www.naceweb.org/home.aspx
"2011 Accounting Graduates Earning Average Salaries of $50,000,"
AccountingWeb, January 31, 2012 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/education-careers/2011-accounting-graduates-earning-average-salaries-50000
Accounting major college graduates earned
an average of $50,500. Entry-level accounting and finance jobs tend
to see steady growth. Highest-paying employers of accounting majors
were securities, commodities, and financial investments employers.
Continued in article
NACE Salary Calculator Center ---
http://www.jobsearchintelligence.com/NACE/salary-calculator-intro/
Jensen Comment
I always warned students to look more at career potential than starting
salaries. For example, a student's lowest starting salary from a public
accountancy firm may be that student's best offer in terms of career
training, experience with quality clients, working atmosphere, travel
requirements, work-at-home opportunities, promotion prospects, etc. Some
firms are better than others in terms of chances of being admitted into
the partnership. Some firms are better than others in terms of working
with clients that offer job change opportunities.
For example, the highest starting salaries for accounting, finance,
and economics graduates are usually Wall Street securities, commodities,
banking, and investments employers. But these are usually accompanied by
high costs of living and possibly time consuming commutes. Compensation
may depend heavily on commissions and bonuses. And a given starting
employee may be only one of hundreds of new hires competing for
recognition and promotion. Accepting a lower salary in a Big Four
auditing firm or even a smaller auditing firm in Des Moines may actually
be a better career choice even if the starting salary is less than
$60,000.
Business School Rankings
Hi Wes,
Thank you for this since it was a ranking I had not seen ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-business-schools-2012-6#
I do track rankings of other media outlets like US News,
Bloomberg Business Week, the WSJ, Forbes, and The Economist ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
This has to be the best one since Stanford comes out on top.
Just kidding of course.
It is the a helpful site in the sense that for each of the 50 ranked
programs it shows the ranks that were also given by US News,
Bloomberg Business Week, Forbes, and The Economist.
Feel free to send me some new pictures. I maintain a file on your
professional photographs.
Thanks,
Bob
Bob Jensen's threads about ranking controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"Are languages important for accountants?" by Mark P. Holtzman,
Accountinator Blog, February 21, 2013 ---
http://accountinator.com/2013/02/21/1151/
Jensen Comment
Increasingly in this global world I've been an advocate of language
skills in general and for accounting graduates in particular. Years ago
I had a student at Trinity University who had a minor in Russian. My
personal opinion is that he probably would not have become a Big Four
partner in the Houston Office. However, when he was transferred to the
Moscow office of that Big Four firm he made partner in record time.
Accounting and auditing firms in Texas have enormous opportunities
for client work in Mexico and most points south where Spanish is
generally the native tongue. I had another student who I never predicted
would get a job with a Big Four firm because I always thought of him
more as a baseball star than a good student in accounting. However,
Trinity University is a special university for language skills. This
baseball player landed a job in the San Antonio office of the Big Four.
Furthermore he was single and more than willing to take on very long
engagements with clients south of the Rio Grande. This student also had
a very engaging personality --- one of the funniest guys I ever met. He
probably should've followed in the footsteps of an accountant named Bob
Newhart ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Newhart
Trinity University has a relatively popular Chinese language program
and quite a few of my former students found it to their advantage to
minor in Chinese.
The 3 Secrets Of Highly Successful Graduates (Slide Show)
"Amazing Career Advice For College Grads From LinkedIn's Billionaire
Founder," by Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, May 12, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-career-advice-for-college-grads-from-linkedins-billionaire-founder-2013-5
Jensen Comment
I'm not sure I agree with all of this. If you search long enough and
hard enough almost everything appears somewhere in the library and/or in
Web documents. The problem is sorting out the wheat from the chaff
beforehand in the context of your particular talent, skills,
determination, family circumstances, living environment, health,
opportunities, and constraints.
Millionaires and billionaires, like Reid Hoffman, often feel they
have the answers to success when in fact much of their success is a
matter of luck along the serendipitous road in life. I grant them the
fact that sometimes you help to make your own luck, but by it's very
definition taking "risks" with careers means that there will be many
losers as long as a few winners along that serendipitous road.
Also most people really do not have the talent for and drive to
becoming successful entrepreneurs. Advising most graduates to become
entrepreneurs may be setting them on a road to failure.
To illustrate my point, I think that many accounting graduates are
better off to become lifelong employees as public accountants, internal
auditors, governmental accountants, FBI agents, etc. Most of them are
likely to fall on very hard times if they quit their jobs and leverage
up to create a startup company.
Hopefully, some of them will take the plunge and form a new venture
in a quest for the American Dream. But this is not good advice for the
majority of those graduates looking down the road at their lifelong
careers. Tell most of those graduates that they may find great careers
as public accountants, internal auditors, governmental accountants, FBI
agents, professors, etc. At the same time tell them to keep their
eyes open to opportunities and to be willing, if they have the
inspiration to do so, to take the plunge. But also tell them not to
become victims of get-rich-quick frauds.
Going Concern's Admittedly Unscientific 2012 Survey of Starting
Salaries for New Accounting Graduates ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/recruiting-season-public-accounting-salaries-starting-class-2013
Jensen Comment
Keep in mind that cost of living varies.
When I was still teaching it was somewhat easier to get a Big Four
starting job in San Francisco relative to San Antonio. In San Francisco
the salary would hardly pay for a one-room apartment without partnering
to share the rent. Starting salaries are often not fully adjusted for
higher cost-of-living cities.
Also I will mention my oft-repeated advice to college graduates. The
amount of starting salary should be a low priority relative to
prospective employer training, exposure to clients who are often the way
career tracks head after a year or two with a CPA firm, opportunities in
areas of interest such as tax or IT, and opportunities for international
transfer (e.g., to Asia), and expected travel requirements (tough for
expecting parents), and opportunity for work at home (great for
expecting parents).
CPA firms do not offer high enough salaries for entry-level auditing
and tax to attract graduates from prestigious MBA programs. These firms
do not hire many such MBA graduates and when they do hire these
graduates at higher salaries it is generally for consulting rather than
auditing and tax. CPA firms generally want consultants who have
considerable on-the-job training and special skills such as IT and
language skills.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"For Newly Minted M.B.A.s, a Smaller Paycheck Awaits," by Ruth
Simon, The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2013 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324296604578175764143141622.html?mg=reno64-wsj
Like many students, Steve Vonderweidt hoped
that a master's degree in business administration would open doors
to a new job with a higher paycheck.
But now, about eight months after receiving
his M.B.A. from the University of Louisville, Mr. Vonderweidt, 36
years old, hasn't been able to find a job in the private sector, and
continues to work as an administrator at a social-service agency
that helps Louisville residents obtain food stamps, health care and
other assistance. He is saddled with about $75,000 in student-loan
debt—much of it from graduate school.
"It was a really great program," says Mr.
Vonderweidt. "But the job part has been atrocious."
Soaring tuition costs, a weak labor market
and a glut of recent graduates such as Mr. Vonderweidt are upending
the notion that professional degrees like M.B.A.s are a sure ticket
to financial success.
The M.B.A.'s lot is partly reflected in
starting pay. While available figures vary by schools and employers,
recruiters' expected median salary for newly hired M.B.A.s was
essentially flat between 2008 and 2011, not adjusting for inflation,
according to a survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council.
For graduates with minimal experience—three
years or less—median pay was $53,900 in 2012, down 4.6% from
2007-08, according to an analysis conducted for The Wall Street
Journal by PayScale.com. Pay fell at 62% of the 186 schools
examined.
Even for more seasoned grads the trend is
similar, says Katie Bardaro, lead economist for PayScale.com. "In
general, it seems that M.B.A. pay is either stagnant or falling,"
she says.
The pressures are greatest for those
attending less prestigious schools, says Stanford Business School
professor Paul Oyer, who studies personnel trends. But even at top
programs, some graduates are likely to struggle in today's
environment, he says.
Another burdensome issue: a high debt load.
Nearly 60% of graduating M.B.A.s said they expected to repay some
loans after graduation, according to a 2012 GMAC survey. Among
households headed by people with student debt who attended graduate
school and are under 35, average student loan debt climbed to
$81,758 in 2010 according a Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal
Reserve data. That figure is up from $55,594 in 2007.
It is all a far cry from the late 1980s and
early 1990s heyday for M.B.A.s, when some companies would hire 100
or more M.B.A.s. It wasn't uncommon to recruit first, and fill
actual jobs later.
"Some of those companies would hire today
barely in the single-digits," says Mark Peterson, president of the
M.B.A. Career Services Council.
A weak economic climate is only partly to
blame for the M.B.A.'s plight. The changing nature of B-school
programs, evolving corporate needs—as well as the perceived value of
the degree—have all helped dilute the M.B.A.'s allure.
Formerly, the traditional M.B.A. was mainly
the product of a full-time, two-year program. But beginning in the
early 1990s, many schools created part-time and executive M.B.A.
programs, with lower-ranked schools often following in the footsteps
of academic leaders. Online degrees also gained in popularity.
As a result, the number of M.B.A. degrees
granted has grown faster than the population, says Brooks Holtom, a
management professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of
Business.
"An M.B.A. is a club that is now not
exclusive," he says. "You should not assume that this less exclusive
club is going to confer the same benefits."
Today's global corporate culture amplifies
the competition. "We are trying to internationalize our business
like everyone else," says Lee Ashton, director of international
human resources at spirits maker Brown-Forman Corp. BF.B +0.37% With
58% of its business outside the U.S., the Louisville company has
stepped up recruiting of M.B.A.s from abroad.
U.S. schools granted a record 126,214
masters degrees in business and administration in the 2010-2011
academic year, a 74% jump from 2000-2001, according to the
Department of Education. The M.B.A. march is part of an overall boom
in advanced degrees that took on added steam as some recent college
graduates and others sought refuge from the recession by pursuing
advanced degrees. Tuition and fees for full-time M.B.A. programs has
risen 24% over the past three years, according to the main body that
accredits U.S. business schools.
It is unclear how many M.B.A.s the market
really needs. Recently, more companies have indicated that "they are
moving away from an emphasis on M.B.A.s" and are instead hiring more
undergraduates at lower salaries that they can then train in-house,
says Camille Kelly, vice president of employer branding at Universum,
a firm that advises companies on how to attract and retain the best
employees. Companies, she says, "still will do M.B.A. hiring, but it
won't be to the same extent they have in the past."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Texas: Bar Exam Passage Rates by University ---
http://www.ble.state.tx.us/stats/stats_0212.htm
Thank you for the heads up Dennis Elam
Bob Jensen's threads on Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
Baylor Law School ---
http://www.baylor.edu/law/
The Baylor Law Data Dump
Baylor University School of Law Reveals Each Student's Grade Average,
LSAT Score, Alma Mater, Race, Ethnicity, and Scholarship Amount
Law School Admission Test (LSAT) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSAT
Scoring
The LSAT is a
standardized test in that LSAC adjusts raw scores to fit an
expected norm to overcome the likelihood that some administrations
may be more difficult than others.
Normalized scores are distributed on a
scale with a low of 120 to a high of 180.
The LSAT system of scoring is predetermined and does not reflect
test takers' percentile, unlike the SAT. The relationship between
raw questions answered correctly (the "raw score") and scaled score
is determined before the test is administered, through a process
called
equating. This means that the conversion standard is set
beforehand, and the distribution of
percentiles can vary during the scoring of any particular LSAT.
Adjusted scores resemble a
bell curve, tapering off at the extremes and concentrating near
the
median. For example, there might be a 3-5 question difference
between a score of 175 and a score of 180, but the difference
between a 155 from a 160 could be 9 or more questions. Although the
exact percentile of a given score will vary slightly between
examinations, there tends to be little variance. The 50th percentile
is typically a score of about 151; the 90th percentile is around 163
and the 99th is about 172. A 178 or better usually places the
examinee in the 99.9th percentile.
Examinees have the option of canceling their scores within six
calendar days after the exam, before they get their scores. LSAC
still reports to law schools that the student registered for and
took the exam, but releases no score. There is a formal appeals
process for examinee complaints,[16]
which has been used for proctor misconduct, peer misconduct, and
occasionally for challenging a question. In very rare instances,
specific questions have been omitted from final scoring.
University of North Texas economist Michael Nieswiadomy has
conducted several studies (in 1998, 2006, and 2008) derived from
LSAC data. In the most recent study Nieswiadomy took the LSAC's
categorization of test-takers into 162 majors and grouped these into
29 categories, finding the averages of each major:[17]
-
Mathematics/Physics
160.0
-
Economics and
Philosophy/Theology
(tie) 157.4
-
International relations 156.5
-
Engineering 156.2
-
Government/service 156.1
-
Chemistry 156.1
-
History 155.9
-
Interdisciplinary studies 155.5
-
Foreign languages 155.3
-
English 155.2
-
Biology/natural
sciences 154.8
-
Arts 154.2
-
Computer science 154.0
-
Finance 153.4
-
Political science 153.1
-
Psychology 152.5
-
Liberal arts 152.4
-
Anthropology/geography
152.2
-
Accounting 151.7
-
Journalism 151.5
-
Sociology/social
work 151.2
-
Marketing 150.8
-
Business management 149.7
-
Education 149.4
-
Business administration 149.1
-
Health professions 148.4
-
Pre-law 148.3
-
Criminal justice 146.0
The Baylor Law Data Dump ---
http://abovethelaw.com/2012/04/the-baylor-law-data-dump-now-with-race-and-scholarships/2/
If you're interested in this data it may be best to download it now. I
don't expect this to remain on the Web for long.
"The Law School System Is Broken,"
National Jurist, February 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.nxtbook.com/splash/nationaljurist/nationaljurist.php?nxturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nxtbook.com%2Fnxtbooks%2Fcypress%2Fnationaljurist0212%2Findex.php#/18/OnePage
Thank you Paul Caron for the heads up
Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
At the University of Texas MBA women graduates edged out men in terms
of compensation offers
At the University of Michigan female and male MBA graduates average
about the same compensation offers
Why are women MBA graduates from Stanford not faring as well as their
male counterparts?
"Why Stanford MBA Men Make So Much More Than Women?" by Alison
Damast, Bloomberg Business Week, December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-21/why-stanford-mba-men-make-so-much-more-than-women
The gender pay gap at Stanford’s
Graduate School of Business has female
graduates earning 79¢ on the male dollar, the widest discrepancy in
earnings between men and women at any of the top 30 business
schools, according to
new research from Bloomberg
Businessweek.
That disparity may seem large, but it isn’t
startling to many of the women in the Stanford Class of 2012, who
say the figures largely indicate the wide range of career choices
they are making.
Take Shan Riku, who worked as a consultant
at McKinsey before business school and is now working as head of new
business development at Cookpad, Japan’s largest recipe-sharing
website. Riku admits she took a pay cut in accepting the position
but says she was more interested in taking on a role that would
challenge her. It also didn’t hurt that Cookpad encourages families
to cook and spend time together. “Many women at Stanford tend to
make choices that are a little bit more focused on ‘how do I want to
balance my life,’ rather than ‘how can I earn a lot of money,’” she
says.
Pulin Sanghvi, director of the career
management center at Stanford’s business school, says most of the
pay gap at his school can be “attributed to industry choice.”
According to Sanghvi, women and men at Stanford who go into the
consulting or Internet technology sectors tend to have average
starting salaries that are close or equivalent in size. Those 2012
MBA graduates who headed into the consulting field received a mean
base salary of $130,636, while others who went into the technology
sector earned $118,050, according to the business school’s most
recent employment report.
The wage gap comes about partly because
fewer women are heading into some of the more lucrative finance
fields. For example, 16 percent of male students took jobs in
private equity and leveraged-buyout firms, compared with just 5
percent of women, Sanghvi says. The top four industries that
Stanford women went into in 2012 were information technology,
management consulting, consumer products, and venture capital.
“I think a part of the story of this
generation of students is that they have a much larger playing field
in terms of career choices,” Sanghvi says. “I don’t think the level
of income in a job is necessarily the primary motivator for why
someone makes an empowered choice to pursue a career.”
That’s not to say that women at the school
aren’t thinking long and hard about their salary offers and how to
best negotiate them.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This says very little about graduates wanting to become CPAs since
Stanford does not offer a career track for taking the CPA examination.
The few graduates who do seek to become auditors or tax accountants most
likely were CPAs before entering Stanford's MBA program. After
graduating they most likely will no longer seek to work for CPA firms as
auditors and tax accountants.
Bob Jensen's threads on the gender pay gap in academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
"For Aspiring Forensic Accountants and Fraud Investigators,"
by Tracey Coenen, The Fraud Files Blog, March 24, 2013 ---
http://www.sequenceinc.com/fraudfiles/2013/03/for-aspiring-forensic-accountants-and-fraud-investigators/
Bob Jensen's threads on forensic accounting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001c.htm#Forensic
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"MBA Gender Pay Gap: An Industry Breakdown," by: Alison Damast,
Bloomberg Business Week, January 7, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-07/mba-gender-pay-gap-an-industry-breakdown
Ross School (University of Michigan) Nearly Erases MBA Gender Pay Gap
-(for graduates) ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-14/ross-school-nearly-erases-mba-gender-pay-gap
At the University of Texas women MBAs beat out the men ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-12/mccombs-women-beat-mba-gender-salary-gap
Jensen Comment
This does not mean that there were no differences between majors. For example,
women finance graduates earned about $6,500 less than men majoring in finance,
but they may have been paid more than women in management and marketing.
I do not know that this is the case, but as in the case of comparing inequality
between nations, it's important to note that the degree of equality is not
nearly as important as the level of poverty. For example, the Gini Coefficients
of equality are about the same for Canada and North Korea, but the absolute
differences in poverty are immense.
Accounting firms probably do not hire many MBA graduates from Michigan since
Michigan has a separate Masters of Accounting Program ---
http://www.bus.umich.edu/Admissions/Macc/Whyross.htm
It would surprise me if there were any gender differences in salary offers in
this MAC program, although there may be some racial differences where top
minority graduates have higher offers than whites.
The one question about all this that I would raise is job location. At
Trinity University when I was still teaching we sometimes placed a single
graduate from our very small MS in Accounting graduating class at a higher
salary in San Francisco or some other city having very high living costs.
The ANOVA statistician in me questions gender comparisons across geographic
cells having greatly varying living costs. For example the MBA woman landing a
consulting job for $140,000 in San Francisco or Geneva really cannot compare her
salary with the woman who gets $140,000 in Detroit. In Detroit some relatively
nice houses are being given away free to people who will occupy them full time.
The exact same house in San Francisco might sell for $845,000. So much for
declaring that both women are being paid the same.
It's also difficult to compare salary offers that are variable. For example,
it's common to offer base salary plus commissions for majors in marketing and
finance for stock brokers and other sales jobs.
In the 1990s it would've also been difficult to compare some salary offers
for graduates in finance and computer science. For example, I know about a
Stanford Computer Science graduate who was paid minimum wage plus $1 million in
stock options. I think this type of hiring declined when the 1990s technology
bubble burst and FAS 126R went into effect. FAS 123R pretty much killed stock
option compensation.
Bob Jensen's threads on gender salary differences ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
At the University of Texas MBA women graduates edged out men in terms of
compensation offers
At the University of Michigan female and male MBA graduates average about the
same compensation offers
Why are women MBA graduates from Stanford not faring as well as their male
counterparts?
"Why Stanford MBA Men Make So Much More Than Women?" by Alison Damast,
Bloomberg Business Week, December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-21/why-stanford-mba-men-make-so-much-more-than-women
The gender pay gap at Stanford’s
Graduate School of Business has female graduates
earning 79¢ on the male dollar, the widest discrepancy in earnings between
men and women at any of the top 30 business schools, according to
new research from Bloomberg Businessweek.
That disparity may seem large, but it isn’t
startling to many of the women in the Stanford Class of 2012, who say the
figures largely indicate the wide range of career choices they are making.
Take Shan Riku, who worked as a consultant at
McKinsey before business school and is now working as head of new business
development at Cookpad, Japan’s largest recipe-sharing website. Riku admits
she took a pay cut in accepting the position but says she was more
interested in taking on a role that would challenge her. It also didn’t hurt
that Cookpad encourages families to cook and spend time together. “Many
women at Stanford tend to make choices that are a little bit more focused on
‘how do I want to balance my life,’ rather than ‘how can I earn a lot of
money,’” she says.
Pulin Sanghvi, director of the career management
center at Stanford’s business school, says most of the pay gap at his school
can be “attributed to industry choice.” According to Sanghvi, women and men
at Stanford who go into the consulting or Internet technology sectors tend
to have average starting salaries that are close or equivalent in size.
Those 2012 MBA graduates who headed into the consulting field received a
mean base salary of $130,636, while others who went into the technology
sector earned $118,050, according to the business school’s most
recent employment report.
The wage gap comes about partly because fewer women
are heading into some of the more lucrative finance fields. For example, 16
percent of male students took jobs in private equity and leveraged-buyout
firms, compared with just 5 percent of women, Sanghvi says. The top four
industries that Stanford women went into in 2012 were information
technology, management consulting, consumer products, and venture capital.
“I think a part of the story of this generation of
students is that they have a much larger playing field in terms of career
choices,” Sanghvi says. “I don’t think the level of income in a job is
necessarily the primary motivator for why someone makes an empowered choice
to pursue a career.”
That’s not to say that women at the school aren’t
thinking long and hard about their salary offers and how to best negotiate
them.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This says very little about graduates wanting to become CPAs since Stanford does
not offer a career track for taking the CPA examination. The few graduates who
do seek to become auditors or tax accountants most likely were CPAs before
entering Stanford's MBA program. After graduating they most likely will no
longer seek to work for CPA firms as auditors and tax accountants.
Bob Jensen's threads on the gender pay gap in academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
Dumber Lawyers
"Another Drop in LSAT Test-Takers," Inside Higher Ed, November
20, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/11/20/another-drop-lsat-test-takers
"Not a New Problem: How the State of the Legal Profession Has Been
Secretly in Decline for Quite Some Time," by Marc Gans, SSRN, June
24, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2173144
My goal was to provide an
in-depth analysis of the job market for new law graduates over
time, as well as the state of the legal field as a whole. Using
historical records, I reached the following results:
- Depending on which dataset is
used, of the 1.4 million law graduates of the last 40-years,
200,000-600,000 are not working as attorneys.
- Using NALP data, I calculate a
True Employment Percentage (full-time, JD-required jobs
excluding those who start their own practice) and find that
it has been bad for a long time, not just recently. Over the
last 25 years this percentage has averaged 68%, meaning 1
out of every 3 graduates couldn't find legal work. I also
use regression to show that it is not correlated with bar
passage rates.
- Using this True Employment
Percentage, I found that the ABA should have stopped
accrediting law schools in the mid-1970's.
- The ABA dataset shows that
overall, these "newer" law schools have worse employment
outcomes, especially for the most desirable jobs. For
example, 16% of graduates of schools accredited before 1975
found employment in firms of 100 attorneys, while under 4%
of graduates of schools accredited after this time did.
- Income inequality for starting
salaries has been widening dramatically. Over the last 16
years, the 75th percentile real starting salary has
increased 73%, while the 25th percentile real starting
salary has increased just 11% (almost all of it occurring
before 2000).
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Where the Fortune 500 CEOs Went to School: These schools
awarded at least 10 college and graduate degrees to America’s leading
executives," by Menachem Wecker, US News, May 14, 2012 ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-school
Jensen Comment
For years I've preached that students seek prestigious universities for
much more than book learning. The top universities provide networking
opportunities and alumni relations that probably exceed most anything
students learn from the books. Of course, networking experiences are
highly variable.
But there also is a well-known problem of correlation versus
causation going on here. There may be underlying causal factors such as
the attributes of students who gain admission to prestigious schools
that a subset of those students may rise to the top irrespective of
where they graduate.
If you annually track the backgrounds of CPAs admitted into the Big
Four partnerships in the United States you will be surprised the
proportion that graduated as accounting majors for Podunk College. Cream
rising to the top is a fundamental attribute of molecular chemistry.
But we cannot deny the fact that a degree from a prestigious
university is a key that unlocks doors. This is especially the case when
it comes to PhD graduates seeking tenure track positions. A Podunk
College PhD generally does not stack up well with a doctorate from
Harvard, Stanford, and Penn. There are exceptions of course, but these
are rare in the Academy.
Jensen Comment
If there ever was BS about a BS this has to be the site ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
One thing I always warned my students about is that education is much
more than a ticket to a job. Education is part and parcel to almost
everything in life.
And when looking at career alternatives, I always warned my students
to pretty much ignore starting salaries when choosing a career or
choosing from first-time job alternatives. Reasons are as follows:
- Some companies will offer higher starting salaries because
they're weak in other attractions such as training, exposure to
quality clients, job security, travel requirements, benefits, etc.
In public accountancy, for example, the most important things are
training and exposure to quality clients who frequently offer jobs
to selected members of audit teams that conduct onsite audits or
consulting for these clients.
- Local, state, and federal government job offers often look low
relative to job offers from the private sector. But there are often
many advantages to starting out with government such as starting out
with the IRS. Government sometimes offers great training
opportunities. Secondly, government may offer "client" exposures
that provide similar opportunities for career advancement in the
private sector following that first-job in government. Some of our
best accounting firm tax experts are former IRS agents, and some of
our best tax professors were former IRS agents. The name Amy Dunbar
at the University of Connecticut rings a bell here.
- Large firms may offer the highest starting salaries, but the
career opportunities may be greater in small firms. For example, the
probability that an accounting graduate who starts out in a Big Four
accounting firm will ultimately make partner varies among the
hundreds of offices around the world, but the overall probability is
much less than 20%. In fairness, most graduates want Big Four
training and client exposure opportunities without ever intending to
stick around long enough to become partners. Other accounting
graduates would prefer to start out with smaller accounting firms or
companies where they can start out as larger fish in small ponds
with much greater opportunity to become partners or senior managers
or executives.
- Relative to salary at any point in a career, also think about
mobility. It is quite common for employees to change jobs for a
number of reasons, including termination (e.g., no tenure or
promotion), unhappiness in a particular job, transfer of a spouse,
desire to get out of a city, desire to get into a city, etc. Some
careers have greater mobility upon relocation. And high-mobility
careers may not have the highest starting salaries. For example, my
UPS driver up here in the mountains has a BS in finance. He could've
had a higher starting salary when he graduated in Boston, but when
he moved to these mountains he could not find any job in finance. If
he had instead been a nurse, he could've found a nursing job
immediately.
- Think of the lifestyle aspects of a career that become much more
important later in life than salary. For example, many first-year
premed majors change majors after their science teachers fully
explain the lifestyle advantages and disadvantages of being a
lifetime medical doctor. For example, if every day is the same old
thing of reading radiology film, fixing herniated discs, putting in
lens implants, or replacing knees and hips, life can be pretty
boring over the next 40 years. Students should consider the many
aspects of a career other than expected earnings. And there are many
aspects to consider. Physicians generally get rewards of improving
or restoring the lives of their patients. But many also take on
heavy pressures of possibly ruining the lives of their patients.
- Think of the debt and such things as malpractice insurance. For
example, physicians who start out at relatively high salaries or
billings often spend years of paying off the tens of thousands or
more dollars of debt accumulated in medical school. Getting free of
that debt may take a long time. One of my granddaughters estimates
she will be 50 years old before she makes the last payment on
student loans. Also, consider the costs of a career. The malpractice
insurance of my wife's spine surgeon is over $500,000 per year plus
he has to pay for his own office staff, his own office nurses, his
physician assistants, and even his own accountants and computer
specialists.
Lastly, when reading the charts and tables in the site below consider
the aggregation and other weaknesses of the data. For example,
accounting is mixed in with business studies. But the advantages and
disadvantages of an accounting career are much, much different than
those of marketing, management, finance, and other types of business
careers. For example, I looked up the PhD starting salary for a
"business" major in one major university. It was stated as $90,000.
However, accounting PhD graduates at that particular university are more
apt to be $150,000 or more. Plus there are summer stipends that add up
to 20% more to starting salaries.
And while we're at it, consider the starting salary of an accounting
PhD. The highest salary offer may come from Harvard or Stanford, but the
living costs in Cambridge or Palo Alto are possibly twice as much or
more than the living costs in Ames, Iowa --- perhaps ten times as much
in terms of house purchase and rental prices. And the odds of getting
tenure are low at Harvard or Stanford such that considerations such as
research opportunities should outweigh starting salary considerations.
And now for the BS about a BS ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
"All About the Money: What if lawmakers and students used
starting salaries to evaluate colleges and their programs?" by Dan
Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/All-About-the-Money/134422/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
What is your college degree truly worth?
That is the question that a new report
seeks to answer. And it does so by distilling college into a number,
expressed in dollars.
"The Earning Power of Graduates From
Tennessee's Colleges and Universities" is the latest effort to
precisely quantify the value of a degree. It identifies the payoff
that individual programs at specific colleges yield the first year
after graduation. While limited to Tennessee, it will be followed by
similar analyses in other states, and it marks the arrival of a new
way of evaluating higher education that brings conversations about
college productivity and performance to the program level.
Due out this week, the report—by College
Measures, a partnership of the American Institutes for Research and
Matrix Knowledge, a consulting firm—is bound to spark debate about
what it counts and omits, and to raise fears over how its findings
will be used.
The report has been praised by some
analysts for merging data on education and employment in valuable
ways and for producing revealing insights. For instance, in
Tennessee, attending the flagship, in Knoxville, might not lead to a
higher paycheck for new graduates than completing a
community-college program, depending on the major a student chooses.
The report also exposes simmering arguments
in higher education: whether college is chiefly for personal
economic gain or for serving the public good, whether teaching
potential students about the costs and benefits of their college
choices will further cement an already widespread consumerist ethos,
and whether data on disparate outcomes by discipline will fuel more
attacks on liberal-arts programs, whose graduates may not earn large
salaries right after college but fare better later.
Produced in collaboration with the
Tennessee Higher Education Commission, the report was preceded by a
Web site, which became public last month, with
data
for institutions in Arkansas. College
Measures is also producing analyses for Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and
Virginia.
More states may follow suit. About half the
states have the ability to link postsecondary academic records with
labor data, according to a 2010 report by the State Higher Education
Executive Officers. Few states have done so, says Travis J. Reindl,
a program director for the National Governors Association, but
interest is growing in the types of analyses that College Measures
performs.
"Governors care very much about job
creation, and they care very much about meeting work-force needs.
Both of these things rely on good information," says Mr. Reindl.
"This is an issue that's clearly starting to percolate because it
all goes back to jobs, job, jobs."
Salary
Matters
Previous
studies by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the
Workforce, among others, have analyzed
wage differences by major. The Tennessee report breaks new ground,
says Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown center, by
marshaling data from disparate state agencies to identify the
average first-year wages of the state's college graduates between
2006 and 2010, and linking those data to the majors they pursued and
institutions they attended.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
If there ever was BS about a BS or a PhD this has to be the site ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
One thing I always warned my students about is that education is much
more than a ticket to a job. Education is part and parcel to almost
everything in life.
And when looking at career alternatives, I always warned my students
to pretty much ignore starting salaries when choosing a career or
choosing from first-time job alternatives. Reasons are as follows:
- Some companies will offer higher starting salaries because
they're weak in other attractions such as training, exposure to
quality clients, job security, travel requirements, benefits, etc.
In public accountancy, for example, the most important things are
training and exposure to quality clients who frequently offer jobs
to selected members of audit teams that conduct onsite audits or
consulting for these clients.
- Local, state, and federal government job offers often look low
relative to job offers from the private sector. But there are often
many advantages to starting out with government such as starting out
with the IRS. Government sometimes offers great training
opportunities. Secondly, government may offer "client" exposures
that provide similar opportunities for career advancement in the
private sector following that first-job in government. Some of our
best accounting firm tax experts are former IRS agents, and some of
our best tax professors were former IRS agents. The name Amy Dunbar
at the University of Connecticut rings a bell here.
- Large firms may offer the highest starting salaries, but the
career opportunities may be greater in small firms. For example, the
probability that an accounting graduate who starts out in a Big Four
accounting firm will ultimately make partner varies among the
hundreds of offices around the world, but the overall probability is
much less than 20%. In fairness, most graduates want Big Four
training and client exposure opportunities without ever intending to
stick around long enough to become partners. Other accounting
graduates would prefer to start out with smaller accounting firms or
companies where they can start out as larger fish in small ponds
with much greater opportunity to become partners or senior managers
or executives.
- Relative to salary at any point in a career, also think about
mobility. It is quite common for employees to change jobs for a
number of reasons, including termination (e.g., no tenure or
promotion), unhappiness in a particular job, transfer of a spouse,
desire to get out of a city, desire to get into a city, etc. Some
careers have greater mobility upon relocation. And high-mobility
careers may not have the highest starting salaries. For example, my
UPS driver up here in the mountains has a BS in finance. He could've
had a higher starting salary when he graduated in Boston, but when
he moved to these mountains he could not find any job in finance. If
he had instead been a nurse, he could've found a nursing job
immediately.
- Think of the lifestyle aspects of a career that become much more
important later in life than salary. For example, many first-year
premed majors change majors after their science teachers fully
explain the lifestyle advantages and disadvantages of being a
lifetime medical doctor. For example, if every day is the same old
thing of reading radiology film, fixing herniated discs, putting in
lens implants, or replacing knees and hips, life can be pretty
boring over the next 40 years. Students should consider the many
aspects of a career other than expected earnings. And there are many
aspects to consider. Physicians generally get rewards of improving
or restoring the lives of their patients. But many also take on
heavy pressures of possibly ruining the lives of their patients.
- Think of the debt and such things as malpractice insurance. For
example, physicians who start out at relatively high salaries or
billings often spend years of paying off the tens of thousands or
more dollars of debt accumulated in medical school. Getting free of
that debt may take a long time. One of my granddaughters estimates
she will be 50 years old before she makes the last payment on
student loans. Also, consider the costs of a career. The malpractice
insurance of my wife's spine surgeon is over $500,000 per year plus
he has to pay for his own office staff, his own office nurses, his
physician assistants, and even his own accountants and computer
specialists.
Lastly, when reading the charts and tables in the site below consider
the aggregation and other weaknesses of the data. For example,
accounting is mixed in with business studies. But the advantages and
disadvantages of an accounting career are much, much different than
those of marketing, management, finance, and other types of business
careers. For example, I looked up the PhD starting salary for a
"business" major in one major university. It was stated as $90,000.
However, accounting PhD graduates at that particular university are more
apt to be $150,000 or more. Plus there are summer stipends that add up
to 20% more to starting salaries.
And while we're at it, consider the starting salary of an accounting
PhD. The highest salary offer may come from Harvard or Stanford, but the
living costs in Cambridge or Palo Alto are possibly twice as much or
more than the living costs in Ames, Iowa --- perhaps ten times as much
in terms of house purchase and rental prices. And the odds of getting
tenure are low at Harvard or Stanford such that considerations such as
research opportunities should outweigh starting salary considerations.
And now for the BS about a BS ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
"All About the Money: What if lawmakers and students used
starting salaries to evaluate colleges and their programs?" by Dan
Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/All-About-the-Money/134422/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
What is your college degree truly worth?
That is the question that a new report
seeks to answer. And it does so by distilling college into a number,
expressed in dollars.
"The Earning Power of Graduates From
Tennessee's Colleges and Universities" is the latest effort to
precisely quantify the value of a degree. It identifies the payoff
that individual programs at specific colleges yield the first year
after graduation. While limited to Tennessee, it will be followed by
similar analyses in other states, and it marks the arrival of a new
way of evaluating higher education that brings conversations about
college productivity and performance to the program level.
Due out this week, the report—by College
Measures, a partnership of the American Institutes for Research and
Matrix Knowledge, a consulting firm—is bound to spark debate about
what it counts and omits, and to raise fears over how its findings
will be used.
The report has been praised by some
analysts for merging data on education and employment in valuable
ways and for producing revealing insights. For instance, in
Tennessee, attending the flagship, in Knoxville, might not lead to a
higher paycheck for new graduates than completing a
community-college program, depending on the major a student chooses.
The report also exposes simmering arguments
in higher education: whether college is chiefly for personal
economic gain or for serving the public good, whether teaching
potential students about the costs and benefits of their college
choices will further cement an already widespread consumerist ethos,
and whether data on disparate outcomes by discipline will fuel more
attacks on liberal-arts programs, whose graduates may not earn large
salaries right after college but fare better later.
Produced in collaboration with the
Tennessee Higher Education Commission, the report was preceded by a
Web site, which became public last month, with
data
for institutions in Arkansas. College
Measures is also producing analyses for Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and
Virginia.
More states may follow suit. About half the
states have the ability to link postsecondary academic records with
labor data, according to a 2010 report by the State Higher Education
Executive Officers. Few states have done so, says Travis J. Reindl,
a program director for the National Governors Association, but
interest is growing in the types of analyses that College Measures
performs.
"Governors care very much about job
creation, and they care very much about meeting work-force needs.
Both of these things rely on good information," says Mr. Reindl.
"This is an issue that's clearly starting to percolate because it
all goes back to jobs, job, jobs."
Salary
Matters
Previous
studies by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the
Workforce, among others, have analyzed
wage differences by major. The Tennessee report breaks new ground,
says Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown center, by
marshaling data from disparate state agencies to identify the
average first-year wages of the state's college graduates between
2006 and 2010, and linking those data to the majors they pursued and
institutions they attended.
Continued in article
From the Chronicle of Higher
Education
Look up salary data for your university ---
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=144050
Slide Show From Bloomberg Business Week, November 2012
Top B-Schools With the Highest-Paid MBAs ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/top-b-schools-with-the-highest-paid-mbas
Jensen Comment
This is one of those reports where it pays to look at the variance and
kurtosis as well as a measure of central tendency (mean or median).
Also it's not clear how variable compensation (sales commissions and
bonuses) are factored in with fixed portions of salaries. For example,
many of the best entry-level jobs on Wall Street are variable,
performance-based compensation jobs.
And how are benefits factored into the study?
For example, some employees who travel most of the time don't make big
sacrifices for personal housing. I know one, for example, who uses her
parent's address for "home" since she's almost never home. In reality,
she lives most of the year in luxury hotels at the expense of her
employer and dines in the finest restaurants. Is this added
"compensation?"
And note that if your NYC employer sends you to London or Los Angeles
for a long-term consulting engagement, your luxury hotel bill may be
paid for seven days a week even if you only work five days a week. This
is because paying taxi and travel expenses to bring you back to NYC
every week end is more expensive than paying your luxury hotel bill for
those days when your not on the job.
Best and Worst 2012 MBA Job Placement - Job Offers Abundant, for Most -
Business Week
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/best-and-worst-2012-mba-job-placemen
Jensen Comment
Placement data can be somewhat misleading, especially for very small programs.
For example, before Trinity University dropped its MBA program a significant
proportion of the graduates were full-time military employees. At the time San
Antonio's major employers were five military bases, two of which like Lackland
and Kelly were enormous, although many of our MBA students were medical military
from the Brooke Army Hospital. But placement of other graduates was really
problematic. Also the MBA program did not coincide with Trinity's goal of having
only full-time students in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Enrollments
and placements of full-time MBA students were weak, and the MBA program was
dropped. Later a MS program in accountancy was added after Texas passed the
150-credit rule.
The above Bloomberg Business Week link has a somewhat dubious
advertisement from Thunderbird. In that advertisement, Thunderbird rightly
claims to be the Number 1 School for Global Business in various
international-specialty rankings ---
http://www.thunderbird.edu/about-thunderbird/rankings
But Thunderbird does not even make the Top 30 in terms of the above MBA
placement rankings where Thunderbird advertises itself as being Number 1.
Bob Jensen's threads on business school rankings by Bloomberg
Business Week, US News, the WSJ, The Economist, Financial Times,
etc. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Every year, my students at Stanford Graduate
School of Business who want to work for startups ask me for advice on
where they should work. I disappoint them by recommending that they not
to go work for a startup at all.
Andy Rachleff, "48 Hot Tech Companies To Build A Career,"Wealthfront,
October 25, 2012 ---
https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-companies/
Every year, my students at Stanford GSB who
want to work for startups ask me for advice on where they should
work.
I disappoint them by recommending that they
not to go work for a startup at all. I tell them three words I know
it’s hard for them to hear: You’re not ready.
I prefer to see them take their first jobs
after graduation at midsized companies with momentum, not startups,
because they are the companies most likely to be big successes.
Why is success so important? You get more
credit than you deserve for being part of a successful company, and
less credit than you deserve for being part of an unsuccessful
company. Success will help propel your career. At a fast-growing
company, chances are good you’ll have a higher position two years
after you join. At a slow-growth company, no matter how good a job
you do, you won’t have the same opportunities to advance.
When it comes time to leave the successful
company, you’ll be able to write your own ticket. No one will
remember if you were employee 20 or 120. Everyone wants to recruit
or back people from successful companies because they know/think
people carry the lessons of success with them.
You also may gain something that’s even
more valuable from that first job: insight. If you’re part of a
company that’s the leader in a market for which you have a passion,
you’re more likely to develop a unique insight that could lead to a
great company of your own.
Facebook’s Lesson
Perhaps the best illustration of the way a
successful company puts a halo over careers is Facebook. Back in
2006 and 2007, a handful of my students were considering job offers
from what was then a mid-sized company with about $50 million in
revenue. Some of my students were on the verge of rejecting those
offers: Dreaming of startups, they believed that a job at a company
already on a path to rapid growth would be boring.
Some of them listened to my advice, took
jobs at Facebook, and are now benefitting. They are now able to
start their own ventures, become venture capitalists or take their
pick of jobs at hot companies. They’re writing their own tickets.
Facebook is a rarity, of course: its market
capitalization is so large that even employees who joined fairly
late in the game got big payouts. In most cases, joining a mid-sized
company, even one with enough momentum to reach an IPO while you’re
there, won’t make you rich.
Making money is not the point for most of
my students, anyway. They take my classes because they’re the kinds
of people who want to make an impact on the world. Because they have
that desire, and they’re impatient to fulfill it, some of them come
away quite disappointed when I suggest to them that they ought to
wait.
But the odds are that your startup is going
to fail. Why take that chance early in your career? If you’re
willing to take three years to work for a company with momentum,
then your experience at the midsize company will allow you to do
something more amazing in the future. Not many people get multiple
shots at starting a company, so why not put your best foot forward?
By the way, if it hasn’t been obvious
already, I don’t buy the adage that you should start a company when
you’re very young, because that’s when you have the energy. Insight,
not energy, is the key to success in technology and insight doesn’t
arrive on a particular timetable.
Why Mid-Size Companies?
After we talk, I offer to give my students
a spreadsheet of 45-50 companies, U.S.-based or with a strong
presence here, that fit my description of an ideal company to work
for. I compile this list each year by talking to about 10-15 venture
capitalists at the premier venture firms.
Now, I’m sharing my list with you, as a
follow on to the posts we’ve written on our
Startup Compensation Tool and
How Do I Choose Where To Work?.
All our advice on Silicon Valley careers is
based on a simple idea: that your choice of company trumps
everything else. It’s more important than your job title, your pay
or your responsibilities.
The companies we’ve listed have revenue
between $20 and $300 million. They’re growing fast and appear likely
to maintain their momentum for the foreseeable future. It’s
important that your potential employer have enough momentum to keep
growing rapidly until you decide to leave – probably after about
three or four years if you want to assure yourself of the
aforementioned halo.
Why not a startup? Most
startups fail. That means their risk/reward ratios don’t look good.
That concept is important in investing, too: You want the highest
possible return for the least amount of risk. We pay a lot of
attention to risk/reward ratios at Wealthfront to build our clients’
portfolios; you should apply the same sort of thinking when it comes
to your career.
Why the upper limit of revenue?
Above a certain company size, the lessons you learn are no longer
applicable to the startup you eventually want to be part of. For
example, if you join Facebook or Google today, you’ll spend most of
your time learning how to take advantage of your company’s massive
market position. Startups don’t have that problem so those lessons
learned are not of much value. Company-building lessons tend to
translate until around $300 million of revenue, though that is
extremely subjective.
What Happens Next?
My students who put off their startup
ambitions to join mid-size companies with momentum have been more
successful than my students who choose to start their own companies
directly after school. Their experiences at their first jobs helped
them develop an expertise that placed them in high demand.
After those first jobs, some of my former
students have taken senior positions with hot startups. Others have
founded companies, and had an easier time getting funded than they
otherwise could have. They were smart: They took the time to make
themselves ready for their startup careers. Now, those careers are
taking off.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The Stanford GSB does not have a program geared to becoming a CPA and
places very few graduates in CPA firms. But Andy's advice about not
going to work for a startup firm as an accountant applies to graduates
of accounting programs. The best starting point for an accounting
graduate is a large CPA firm as a rule or the IRS. Seek out the firms
with the best training programs and those that provide benefits for
passing the CPA examination. The largest CPA firms and the IRS generally
have the best training programs. Also they usually have better
opportunities for exposures to wider types of clients, clients who in
turn often make job offers to the CPA firm employees that impress them
the most. And both the large CPA firms and the IRS look good on a
resume.
Having been an FBI agent also looks good on a resume, but the FBI
generally does not hire inexperienced accountants fresh out of college
except possibly those graduating with a combination of high IT and
accounting credentials. But the FBI now hires more experienced
accountants than lawyers.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
There are so many business school rankings by Bloomberg Business Week
that it boggles my mind, to say nothing of the other media rankings of
business schools by U.S. News, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times,
The Economist, etc.
The above link is one of the more interesting rankings because it
vividly illustrates what I call the "Vegetable Problem of Aggregation"
in the context of accounting number aggregations at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
Take a look at how your
favorite greens stack up in the chart below:
|
Green
(Raw - per 100 g serving) |
Vitamin A |
Vitamin C |
Fiber |
Folate |
Calories |
|
Arugula |
2,373 IU |
15
mg |
1
g |
97
mcg |
25 |
|
Chicory |
4,000 IU |
24
mg |
4
g |
109.5 mg |
23 |
|
Collards |
3,824 IU |
35.3 mg |
3
g |
166 mcg |
30 |
|
Endive |
2,050 IU |
6.5 mg |
3
g |
142 mcg |
17 |
|
Kale |
8,900 IU |
120 mg |
2
g |
29.3 mcg |
50 |
|
Butterhead (includes Boston and Bibb) |
970 IU |
8
mg |
1
g |
73.3 mcg |
13 |
|
Romaine |
2,600 IU |
24
mg |
1
g |
135.7 mcg |
14 |
|
Iceberg |
330 IU |
3.9 mg |
1
g |
56
mcg |
12 |
|
Loose
leaf (red, green) |
1,900 IU |
18
mg |
1
g |
49.8 mcg |
18 |
|
Radicchio |
27
IU |
8
mg |
0
g |
60
mcg |
23 |
|
Spinach |
6,715 IU |
28.1 mg |
2
g |
194.4 mcg |
22 |
|
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1999 |
Also see
Examination of Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols ---
http://iom.edu/Activities/Nutrition/NutritionSymbols.aspx
Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Are Arbitrary
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Combine Different Measurements With
Varying Accuracies
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Leave Out Important Components
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Ignore Complex & Synergistic
Interactions of Value and Risk
Systemic Problem: Disaggregating of Value or Cost is Generally
Arbitrary
While looking at the following
diet guides, it dawned on me that perhaps accounting reports should be
more like food labeling and comparison tables/charts rather than the
traditional bottom line reporting. The problem with accounting is
bottom-line reporting of selective and ill-conceived aggregates such as
earnings-per-share or debt/equity. Suppose spinach has an e.p.s. of
4.67 in comparison to 5.62 for Kale. The aggregations all depend upon
how components are measured, how they are weighted (e.g., Vitamin A
versus Folate weighting coefficients), and what components are
included/excluded (e.g., Vitamin A is included below, but Vitamin B
components are ignored). The same is true of e.p.s. in financial
reporting. The "bottom line" depends in a complex way upon how
components are measured and weighted as well as upon what components are
included/excluded.
In a similar manner, accounting
aggregations all depend upon how components are measured, weighted, and
included/excluded. Cash is measured with great accuracy whereas
goodwill impairment is highly inaccurate, thereby causing greater error
range when cash and goodwill are added together in balance sheets.
Similarly, in the "New Economy" where intangible intellectual capital is
soaring in value relative to traditional tangible assets, the
intangibles left off the balance sheet may be far more important that
the combined value of everything included in the balance sheet.
An even larger problem is that
the value and risk of diet components depend heavily upon complex and
synergistic relationships. For example, research shows that after the
body hits its maximum threshold of Vitamin C, it simply throws off the
excess. Kale far surpasses endive in Vitamin C content, but this is
irrelevant in a diet overflowing in Vitamin C from other sources such as
citrus fruits. Some persons may be allergic to components that are of
greater value to other persons.
In a similar manner accounting valuations are greatly complicated by
synergistic complexities. A patent in the hands of one company may be
all but useless in the hands of another company. Indeed some companies
buy up patents just to squelch newer technology that threatens existing
products. Similarly, financial risk is not a fixed thing. It is a very
dynamic threat that is based upon all sorts of contingencies such as
world events and media coverage that can interact heavily with the level
of risk at any point in time.
For similar reasons
disaggregating of values/costs is generally arbitrary. Firstly there is
the famous problem of joint production cost allocation arbitrariness
noted in the early writings of John Stuart Mill (The Principles of
Political Economy) and Alfred Marshall (The Principles of
Economics). Then there is the problem of synergistic complexities
noted above. For example, suppose spinach sells for $5 per bunch. Any
attempt to disaggregate that $5 into additive values of nutrients will
be arbitrary, because nutrients in combination may be worth more or less
than the sum of disaggregated values of each nutrient. This gives rise
to the systemic problem of consolidation goodwill when two or more
companies are combined into one whole.
Bob Jensen's threads on media rankings of colleges and
universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"How to Reduce America's Talent Deficit: At Microsoft, we
have more than 6,000 open jobs in the U.S. Some 3,400 of the positions
are for engineers. Schools aren't producing graduates with the skills
needed in the marketplace," by Brad Smith (executive vice president
and general counsel of Microsoft) , The Wall Street Journal,
October 18, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578058163640361032.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Each month, when the government publishes
the national jobs report, Americans pick over small movements in the
headline rate of unemployment. In doing so, they largely miss a
crucial aspect of the U.S. jobs crisis.
Many American companies are now creating
more jobs for which they can't find qualified applicants than jobs
for which they can. Thus the economy faces a paradox: Too many
Americans can't find jobs, yet too many companies can't fill open
positions. There are too few Americans with the necessary science,
technology, engineering and math skills to meet companies' demand.
At
Microsoft,
MSFT -0.32%
we have more than 6,000 open jobs in the U.S., a 15% increase from a
year ago. Some 3,400 of these positions are for engineers, software
developers and researchers (a 34% increase from last year).
Other companies face the same problem. As
the national unemployment rate this summer exceeded 8% for the third
consecutive year, the rate in computer-related occupations was only
3.4%. Even outside of the technology sector, nearly every firm is in
some way a software company given the importance of automation. So
America's skills shortage affects businesses in every industry and
region.
Unfortunately the problem is likely to get
even worse. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
U.S. this year will create some 120,000 new jobs requiring at least
a bachelor's degree in computer science. But all of our colleges and
universities put together will produce only 40,000 new bachelor's
degrees in computer science. The BLS forecasts that this demand for
new jobs will persist every year this decade. And when one adds the
high multiplier effect of engineering jobs—each one filled typically
leads to five additional jobs in the economy, according to Berkeley
economist Enrico Moretti—it is clear that this problem touches all
of us.
If we don't increase the number of
Americans with necessary skills, jobs will increasingly migrate
abroad, creating even bigger challenges for our long-term
competitiveness and economic growth. This is a personal crisis for
young people facing an increasing opportunity divide.
America has more than 30,000 public high
schools and 12,000 private ones, yet last year only 2,100 of these
schools offered the advanced placement course in computer science.
Four decades after Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were teenagers, we
still live in a country where you have to be one of the fortunate
few to take computer science in high school.
Last month Microsoft laid out a proposal
for how to begin addressing the problem. It couples long-term
improvements in American education with short-term, skills-focused
immigration reform. Done right, immigration reforms can even help
fund education improvements, ensuring that more Americans gain the
skills they need.
We need a national "Race to the Future"
akin to the Obama administration's Race to the Top grant program
(which Mitt Romney praises). It would provide new funding and
incentives for states to:
• Strengthen science, technology,
engineering and math education in grade school by recruiting and
training teachers and implementing the Common Core State
Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards.
• Broaden access to computer science in
high schools.
• Help colleges and universities raise
their graduation rates.
• Expand colleges' capacity to produce
more degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, with
a particular focus on computer science.
On the immigration front, Congress should
create a new, supplemental category with 20,000 annual visas for
people with science and technology skills that are in short supply.
Lawmakers should also take advantage of existing, unused green cards
by allocating 20,000 for workers with these vital skills.
It would be fair and feasible to make these
supplemental steps more expensive, for example by charging $10,000
for the new high-skill visas and $15,000 for the new green cards.
(Large companies pay about $2,300 for each such H-1B petition
today.) This would raise $5 billion over the next decade that the
federal government could provide to states committed to smart
reforms for cultivating important job skills.
Microsoft is convinced that these
initiatives could earn bipartisan support, but lawmakers need to
summon the will to act. We can't expect to build the economy of the
future with only the jobs and ideas of the past.
Jensen Comment
In spite of the tone of the above article there are a number of things
to keep in mind.
- The science and technology (STEM) opportunities for graduates
(bachelor, masters, and Ph.D. graduates) are heavily skewed among
the sub-disciplines. Whereas chemistry, physics, mathematics, and
geology graduates struggle to advance their careers with good jobs
following graduation, IT and most of the engineering graduates face
better prospects. Emory University dropped its geology program, and
Texas universities dropped some of their physics programs. For
better job opportunities many science and engineering graduates
enter MBA programs and/or doctoral programs. Opportunities in law
declined.
- Science and engineering Ph.D. graduates finding opportunities in
industry do not find the same opportunities in academe. Universities
that have tenure track openings in science and engineering are
usually flooded with highly qualified applicants. And affirmative
action comes into play where qualified women and minorities are
favored to fill those science and engineering tenure track openings.
There are shortages of women and minority candidates in engineering
and computer science in industry and in academe.
- Job opportunities are geographically skewed for science and
technology graduates. For example, the son of one of our best
friends up here in the White Mountains is graduating in IT this year
from a regional college in northern New Hampshire. If he had instead
been an accounting graduate there would be opportunities to work for
a regional accounting firm, business firm, and even regional
government agencies. After he gains experience say in tax
accounting, there might also be opportunities to start his own
accounting firm northern New Hampshire. But there are virtually no
decent IT opportunities regionally, just as there are virtually no
regional opportunities for most any type of engineering, science, or
mathematics graduate. IT and engineering job opportunities exist but
vary geographically. In most instances graduates must move to large
cities offering varying career opportunities. The woman and mother
of the IT graduate mentioned above has two degrees in entomology.
But to live in Littleton, New Hampshire her business is into
landscaping, house painting, and wallpapering. To find a career in
entomology she would have to move far from Littleton, NH.
- In the 1950s, an accounting and engineering graduate with a C
average generally faced some good job opportunities following
graduation. With grade inflation in colleges and universities over
the ensuing decades, a C average graduate in almost any discipline
faces dismal job opportunities in 2012. For example, those
accounting graduates having a 3.5 or higher grade averages have the
world at their feet in the 21st Century in North America. But those
with 2.3 grade averages might have to move back home to live with
their parents and/or accept a job that does not even require a
college education. The same thing has happens to 2.3 g.p.a. science
and engineering graduates.
The Sad State of North American
Accounting Ph.D. Programs
Accounting at a Tipping Point (Slide Show)
Former AAA President Sue Haka
April 18, 2009
http://commons.aaahq.org/files/20bbec721b/Midwest_region_meeting_slides-04-17-09.pptm
Bob Jensen's threads on the
Sad State of North American Ph.D. Programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Bob Jensen's threads on career opportunities are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
AccountingWeb's 50-State Report on College and Career Readiness
---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/50-state-report-college-and-career-readiness/219874?source=education
With all fifty states and the District of
Columbia (DC) having adopted college- and career-ready standards in
English and mathematics,
Achieve's seventh annual
Closing the Expectations Gap report
(released September 13) shows how all states
are aligning those standards with policies to send clear signals to
students about what it means to be academically prepared for college
and careers after high school graduation.
For the first time, the report also
details not only states' policy progress on the college- and
career-ready agenda, but also their efforts to implement those
policies, since only faithful implementation can improve student
achievement. The report was released during the opening session
of Achieve's eighth annual American Diploma Project Leadership
Team Meeting in Alexandria, Virgina, which brought together
nearly 300 education leaders in cross-sector teams from
thirty-four states.
"With all states adopting college- and
career-ready standards, they have now taken the first step
toward reorienting the mission of their K-12 systems to reflect
the demands of the twenty-first century," said Mike Cohen,
Achieve's president, to a crowd of education leaders from across
the country. "As this report shows, various states are making
some movement toward fulfilling the college- and career-ready
agenda by putting new policies in place to support this new
mission, but there is still much room for progress to be made."
Achieve conducts an annual policy survey
that asks all fifty states and DC whether they have adopted
standards, graduation requirements, assessments, and
accountability systems aligned to the expectations of two- and
four-year colleges and employers. The national survey of state
education leaders has measured the same areas of reform each
year since the National Governors Association and Achieve
cosponsored the National Education Summit in 2005. This year's
survey reveals the following results:
Standards:
- All fifty states and DC have adopted
standards aligned to the expectations of college and careers.
- Forty-six states and DC have adopted
the Common Core State Standards.
- Four have state-developed College and
Career Ready (CCR) standards.
- By 2015-2016, all English language
arts and mathematics instruction should reflect CCR
expectations.
Graduation Requirements:
- Today, twenty-three states and DC have
adopted college- and career-ready graduation requirements that
require all students to meet the full set of expectations
defined in the CCSS.
- Hawaii, Iowa, and Washington raised
their graduation requirements to the college- and career-ready
level in 2011.
Assessments:
- Today, eighteen states administer
college- and career-ready high school assessments capable of
producing a readiness score that postsecondary institutions use
to make placement decisions.
- Four new states - Florida, North
Carolina, Oregon, and Wyoming - joined this list in 2011 by
adopting a policy to administer a college- and career-ready test
to its high school students.
- It is expected that forty-four states
and DC that are participating in one or both Race to the Top
assessment consortia will meet this criteria when the next
generation assessments are administered for the first time in
2014-2015.
Accountability:
- A majority of states, thirty-two, have
now incorporated at least one of four accountability indicators
that Achieve has identified as critical to promoting college and
career readiness.
- As in last year's report, only Texas
meets Achieve's criteria regarding the use of all indicators in
its college- and career-ready accountability system.
- Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and
Kentucky have included the use of multiple college- and
career-ready indicators in their accountability systems in
multiple ways.
- Since last year, states have made
important gains on the college- and career-ready agenda with all
adopting college- and career-ready standards, and additional
states moving toward more accountability.
- Even as additional progress is made,
states have further to go by turning their attention to the
implementation of standards and related policies.
"States and the larger education
community must make sure educators have access to resources like
quality instructional materials and effective professional
development," Cohen urged. "Success is going to take the
combined effort of all education stakeholders - students,
teachers, principals, K-12 leaders, school board members,
superintendents, administrators, policymakers, postsecondary
education leaders, the business community, and parents."
Continued in article
"LSAT Scores at Top Schools Are Dropping Like Flies," by Vivia
Chen, The Careerist.com, September 7, 2012 ---
http://thecareerist.typepad.com/thecareerist/2012/09/law-school-applicants-dumbing-down.html
If you think you're a pretty smart
cookie—but not spectacularly so—this might be the year that you can
squeeze into a better law school than you thought possible.
The reason is simple: There are fewer
applicants, which results in more opportunities at more prestigious
law schools. You've probably heard about
that 25 percent drop in law school applications
in the past three years or so, but did you know that the top 14 law
schools will be forced to accept students who are below the top 2
percent of their LSATs? (Sobs, please.)
Here's the
nitty gritty from Blueprint, an LSAT
tutoring company, based on statistics from the
Law School Admissions Council, Inc.:
We see that in
2010/2011, there were 3,430 students in the top 2 percent on the
LSAT (171+), which is at or near the median LSAT score for most
elite (top 14 or T14 as determined by U.S. News & World Report
rankings) law schools. That number drops to 2,600 in 2011/2012,
resulting in nearly 1,000 fewer top percentile scores from which law
schools can recruit.
So what does this all mean? Naturally,
Blueprint is telling people to go for it—since it's in the LSAT
tutoring biz. Here's how it explains the trickle-down effect of
lowered law school admissions standards:
With fewer
applicants at the top for the same number of slots, the entire
admissions game is going to undergo a large shift. Students
traditionally just outside the T14 based on their numbers will find
themselves admitted, or on waitlists. As they jump at the
opportunity to mortgage their future for a top school . . . their
slots in T20 schools will open up for those below them, and so on.
LSAT scores more than any other aspect of
the application determines acceptance, notes Blueprint: "LSAT
accounts for up to 60 percent of the admission decision."
Blueprint also says that applicants are too
pessimistic about the cost of law school tuition and their prospects
for getting into law schools. It conducted a poll of of nearly 600
prospective law students, in conjunction with Above the Law.
Their finding: "The majority of prelaw students are actually
overestimating the cost of attending law school." It also finds that
more than a quarter of the students (27 percent) think it's harder
to gain admission than it actually is.
So is law school easier to get into now?
Perhaps. But is that a good enough reason to dedicate yourself to
three years of schooling for a profession you might not like
(assuming you can get a job that requires a legal degree)?
Uh, I don't think so.
Jensen Question
So where are those top prospects going who decide not to go to law
school?
Answer
I really don't know, but if they were thinking about law school as
undergraduates not many of them probably did not earn enough
undergraduate credits for accounting, architecture, engineering,
medical school, vet school, and science. Some may be applying for
government work. Others may be applying for doctoral programs in
humanities. Who knows?
A goodly number of them may instead be applying to MBA programs in
prestigious universities. I'll bet that's it!
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Why an MBA Is Not Always the Right Choice," by Rose
Martinelli , Bloomberg Business Week, April 4, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-04/why-an-mba-is-not-always-the-right-choice
A guest post from Rose Martinelli, formerly the
longtime admissions director at the University of Chicago’s Booth
School of Business, where she wrote a popular admissions blog, The
Rose Report.
My last two posts focused on knowing
yourself, making sense of all the pieces, and sharing what you
learned with your circle of supporters. Now it’s time to focus on
evaluating educational options by defining two of the most common
academic pathways—subject-focused master’s degrees and MBA degree
programs.
Subject-focused master’s degrees are
typically one-year academic programs that focus on a single topic in
great detail, with application of these concepts focused in
functional areas. Programmatic features vary by school and program,
so make sure to do your homework, especially if particular programs
or career support are among your priorities.
MBA programs, on the other hand, are
typically two-year programs, although they are now offered in
one-year or accelerated formats. These “professional” programs focus
on developing the fundamental tools of resource management
(accounting, finance, operations, statistics, marketing, human
resources, economics, and so forth).
The vast majority of MBA programs require
core classes, with the opportunity to pursue majors or
concentrations in specific areas of study. The value of MBA programs
can be found through the breadth of exposure from academic options
and co-curricular activities to professional outcomes. Offered in
full-time, part-time, and executive formats, this degree can be
taken at various stages in your professional development.
Which type of program is right for you?
While there are no right or wrong answers here, I would recommend
that your choice be based upon your undergraduate education, prior
work experience, and future career goals.
If you do not have an undergraduate
business degree, the MBA may be a good option because of its focus
on the fundamentals of business and experiential opportunities, as
well as the breadth of career support available. Even students who
have pursued economics majors or who have done consulting can
benefit from the MBA degree if one of the driving reasons for
pursuing education is the chance to explore and experiment.
If you have an undergraduate business
degree and want additional depth in a particular area, the
subject-oriented masters degree may be ideal. Typically, these are
smaller programs that provide focused instruction in that area of
study. While another option for business undergraduates may be to
pursue an MBA, selecting a school with a flexible core curriculum
will be important if you do not want to repeat prior coursework.
We’ll talk more about that in future posts.
If you are just completing your
undergraduate degree and wish to pursue additional education in
order to prepare you for your first career step, a subject-oriented
masters degree may be just the right choice. Over the past several
years, there has been an expansion in these programs, largely fueled
by the lack of good employment opportunities for college graduates,
as well as the limited number of MBA programs that admit students
without work experience.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In 1982 when I joined the faculty at Trinity University I taught
mostly in Trinity's small MBA program which was one of the three
surviving masters programs that existed after 20+ masters programs
had already been dropped. Interestingly Trinity dropped most of its
masters programs after enormous gifts to its endowment made it
possible to increase the competitive prestige of its undergraduate
programs. Trinity now ranks extremely high in the nation in terms of
endowment per student.
But in the 1980s our MBA program was very small and most of my
classes had less than ten students, many of whom were military
officers stationed at the six major army and air force bases in San
Antonio. We did a market study and discovered what we already knew
--- San Antonio was just not a good city for placements of MBA
graduates since it had so little business sector industry. And our
MBA program just did not have a reputation to compete with MBA
graduates of the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and
SMU.
And so we dropped the MBA program. Some years later when Texas
adopted the 150-hour rule to take the CPA exam in Texas, we
installed a new one-year masters program that mostly served our own
graduating accounting students. We prospered with our small masters
program in accounting mostly because the then Big Five in San
Antonio took a goodly share of our graduating masters students in
accounting. Houston and Dallas Big Five CPA firms picked up most of
the other graduates.
In other words we could place a goodly share of our masters
students in accounting locally or in nearby Dallas and Houston. This
never was the case for our MBA program.
"Top B-School Stories of 2011: 2011 brought good news on the
MBA job front, with unconventional careers more popular than ever.
Plagiarism and cheating marred an otherwise-upbeat year," by Alison
Damast and Erin Zlomek, Business Week, December 28, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/business-schools/top-bschool-stories-of-2011-12282011.html
Graduates Who Are Happy to Land Minimum Wage Careers
"Little-Known (usually unaccredited) Colleges Exploit Visa Loopholes
to Make Millions Off Foreign Students," by Tom Bartlett, Karin
Fischer, and Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, March
20, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Little-Known-Colleges-Make/126822/
Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges working in the gray
zone of fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
"Execs battle skills gap (including accounting) in hiring despite
high unemployment Execs battle skills gap in hiring despite high
unemployment," by Ken Tyscic, CGMA Magazine, July 26, 2012
---
Click Here
http://www.cgma.org/Magazine/News/Pages/20125850.aspx?cm_mmc=smartbrief-_-30Jul12-_-CPALD-_-skillsgap&utm_source=smartbrief&utm_medium=30Jul12&utm_term=CPALD&utm_content=
For the past six years, VASCO Data Security
has dealt with a chronic problem: It hasn’t been able to easily
recruit qualified workers for its software and internet security
operations in Europe. And the plight hasn’t gotten easier – even as
a global economic crisis has led to high unemployment throughout the
continent.
“It seems like in Brussels and in Zurich,
both, we have a hard time when a spot opens up, filling it,” VASCO
CFO Gary Robisch said. “A lot of times we have to settle for
somebody that doesn’t exactly match the qualifications that we
want.”
The economics don’t seem to make sense.
High unemployment, one would presume, would make it easier to fill
jobs. The 17-country euro currency bloc hit a record in May when
unemployment rose to 11.1%, while the rate across the EU was 10.1%,
according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office. US unemployment
has hovered between 8.1% and 8.3% for the past six months.
Yet employers worldwide are still
struggling to find workers with the skills to fill a wide variety of
jobs. The situation is fuelling a human resources conundrum as
employers ponder whether they should hold out and pony up for
candidates with key skills or look to on-the-job training for
promising candidates.
Companies report difficulty locating IT
professionals, engineers,
accountants and specialised
workers such as tugboat captains and MRI technicians. The conundrum
is particularly glaring in pockets of relative prosperity, as VASCO
is learning; the unemployment rates in Belgium and Switzerland are
lower than European averages. A similar scenario has emerged in the
United States, where companies have been clamouring to grow after
years of cuts.
“It just astounds me,” said Tom Kennedy,
vice president and CFO of marine construction and environmental
remediation company J.F. Brennan, which is having trouble recruiting
a safety director, tugboat pilots and project manager-level
engineers who are willing to travel for a company that does business
in 18 US states.
“After doing this for 35 years, I’ve never
seen it like this,” Kennedy said. “You could run an ad any place [in
years past] and get 30 or 40 applicants. Now you get five to 10.”
The American Institute of CPAs’ Business
and Industry Economic Outlook Survey for the second quarter of 2012
demonstrated the recruitment difficulties that management
accountants are facing. Half of the 1,250 respondents said they have
had difficulty filling open positions because their organisations
haven’t been able to find individuals with the appropriate
qualifications.
Worldwide problem
Other reports indicate a similar problem
worldwide. In the PwC Global CEO survey for 2012, 43% of global
respondents said that, in general, it has become more difficult to
hire workers in their industry. Just 12% said it has become easier
to hire. In addition, 29% of CEOs said they were unable to pursue a
market opportunity because of talent constraints.
Continued in article
Job and Career Search Helper Site
O*Net OnLine ---
http://www.onetonline.org/
Yahoo Education ranks "hot careers" through 2018 and beyond.
Accountants/audits get top billing, which is probably the first time we've
ever been called "hot."
http://education.yahoo.net/articles/hot_careers_through_2018.htm
Deloitte University ---
http://careers.deloitte.com/united-states/students/csc_general.aspx?CountryContentID=16027
"Business Degrees Skyrocket in Popularity in Asia," FINS
Asia-Pacific, October 7, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://asia-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB0001424053111903285704576560832111849732/Business-Degrees-Skyrocket-in-Popularity-in-Asia
Accounting Careers are Hot at Rank 2 According to College Board
"Hottest Careers for College Graduates: Experts Predict Where the
Jobs Will Be in 2018," College Board, December 30, 2010
---
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/csearch/majors_careers/236.html
Government economists estimate which
occupations will have the most job openings between 2008 and 2018.
Openings occur because new jobs are created and because workers
retire or leave the field for other reasons.
Check out these top 10 lists of
occupations, sorted by the level of education typically required:
Occupations with the Most Job Openings: Graduate Degree
| Occupation
|
Total Job Openings 2008–2018 |
|
Postsecondary teachers |
553,000 |
|
Doctors and surgeons |
261,000 |
|
Lawyers |
240,000 |
|
Clergy |
218,000 |
|
Pharmacists |
106,000 |
|
Educational, vocational, and school counselors |
94,000 |
|
Physical therapists |
79,000 |
|
Medical scientists, except epidemiologists |
66,000 |
|
Mental health and substance abuse social workers |
61,000 |
|
Instructional coordinators |
61,000 |
Occupations with the Most Job Openings: Bachelor's Degree
| Occupation
|
Total Job Openings 2008–2018 |
|
Elementary school teachers, except special education |
597,000 |
|
Accountants and auditors |
498,000 |
|
Secondary school teachers, except special and vocational
education |
412,000 |
|
Middle school teachers, except special and vocational
education |
251,000 |
|
Computer systems analysts |
223,000 |
|
Computer software engineers, applications |
218,000 |
|
Network systems and data communications analysts |
208,000 |
|
Computer software engineers, systems software |
153,000 |
|
Construction managers |
138,000 |
|
Market research analysts |
137,000 |
Occupations with the Most Jobs Openings: Associate's Degree or
Postsecondary Vocational Award
| Occupation
|
Total Job Openings 2008–2018 |
|
Registered nurses |
1,039,000 |
|
Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants |
422,000 |
|
Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses |
391,000 |
|
Computer support specialists |
235,000 |
|
Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists |
220,000 |
|
Automotive service technicians and mechanics |
182,000 |
|
Preschool teachers, except special education |
178,000 |
|
Insurance sales agents |
153,000 |
|
Heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration technicians |
136,000 |
|
Real estate sales agents |
128,000 |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields
"Re-Engineering Engineering Education to Retain Students," by
Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2012
---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/re-engineering-engineering-education-to-retain-students/28745?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Vancouver, British Columbia—Alarmed
by the tendency of engineering programs to hemorrhage
undergraduates, at a time when the White House has called for
an additional million degrees in science, technology, engineering
and math fields—known as STEM—education
researchers here at the annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science proposed ways to improve the numbers.
At a symposium on engineering education, one group outlined a broad
revamping of curriculum, while another proposed more modest changes
to pedagogy.
The re-evaluation of curriculum is an
effort called
Deconstructing Engineering Education Programs.
The project is led by Ilene Busch-Vishniac,
the provost of McMaster University in Ontario and a mechanical
engineer, and involves faculty from nine universities, including
large public institutions like the University of Washington and
small private ones like Smith College.
Patricia Campbell, a collaborator on the
project who leads an education-consulting firm in Groton, Mass.,
said that the time to get an engineering degree was a major reason
that undergraduates dropped the major. “We call these four-year
schools,” she said. “But 64 percent of STEM undergraduates complete
their degrees in six years.” In engineering, she continued, that was
largely due to two factors: a proliferation of courses, called
“topic creep,” and rigid chains of prerequisite courses that
students had to follow to move on to higher courses.
Matthew Ohland, an associate professor of
engineering education at Purdue University, added that the rigid
structure not only prevented students from getting out of these
programs with a degree, but it also kept potential students from
migrating in. For example, he said, an industrial-engineering
program might insist its students take a particular economics course
to fulfill the program’s general-education requirements. But
sophomores and juniors might have already taken a related but
different econ course. To join the program, they would have to
retake economics, a strong disincentive.
Ms. Campbell (who was formerly a professor
at Georgia State University) and her colleagues attempted to
streamline this system, focusing on mechanical engineering. At nine
schools, they identified mechanical engineering courses that covered
2,149 topics. But after closely looking at the coursework, they
found a number of similar topics with different names, and narrowed
the list of unique topics to 833. Ultimately they grouped the
courses on those topics into 12 clusters, each of which contained
chains of classes focused around closely related topics, and
required few courses from another cluster. The clusters covered all
833 topics, and instructional times ranged from 52 to 115 hours,
with an average length of 91 hours. That corresponds, roughly, to
four hours of course time each week for one semester on the low end
or one year on the high end.
That means, Ms. Campbell said, that a
mechanical-engineering student could cover all the required topics,
but do so in four years, by taking three clusters each year.
It would also, she claimed, meet the
standards of the
Accreditation Board
for Engineering and Technology, because it
includes everything that accredited engineering programs do. Mr.
Ohland, who works as an evaluator for the board, said the accreditor
is open to new approaches like these, although he acknowledged there
were many of what he called “horror stories” about the accreditor
being very traditional and resistant to change. “If you do something
too wild, you have to convince [the board] that it won’t hurt
students.”
No institution has adopted the cluster
formulation. Ms. Campbell said that faculty members were leery of
the new course formulations, which grouped topics that they usually
taught with other topics they did not. The solution, she said, was
team-teaching of a course, but that’s something that pushes many
professors beyond their comfort levels.
A less-radical approach would be to improve
teaching techniques in existing courses, said another symposium
participant, Susan S. Metz, executive director of the Lore-El Center
for Women in Engineering and Science at Stevens Institute of
Technology in Hoboken, N.J. She leads the
Engage
project, a consortium of engineering schools
at 30 institutions, supported by the National Science Foundation, to
identify best practices in teaching.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In accountancy we face somewhat similar problems in that even in
four-year degree programs accounting majors are required to take more
courses in their major than most other majors on campus, including
majors in economics, finance, marketing, and management. To that we now
add a fifth year of courses required to sit for the CPA examination.
But in accountancy we face a different job market than engineers.
There are no shortages of top accounting majors to meet the available
entry level jobs in CPA firms, corporations, and government agencies in
most states. There is a shortage of accounting PhD graduates, but these
shortages are not caused by undergraduate professional accountancy
curricula. The main problem lies in that accountancy PhD degrees take
twice as long as most other doctoral degrees and require mathematics and
statistics prerequisites not taken by former accounting majors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
In the roaring 1990s there was great worry among the CPA firms that
accounting was losing top majors to the soaring bubble of jobs in
computer science, IT, and finance. But that bubble burst big time making
homeless people out of computer science, IT, and finance graduates.
Students who had not yet declared majors returned to the accounting fold
in spite of the expanding requirements to have a fifth year
(150-credits) to sit for the CPA examination.
The curriculum of accountancy has been and probably always will be
dictated by content of the CPA examination. For example, when the CPA
examination commenced to have larger and tougher problems in
governmental accounting, accounting programs beefed up governmental
accounting courses. The same beefing up is now taking place with ethics
content in the curricula. Perhaps this isn't such a bad thing until more
shortages of accounting graduates arise.
The problem with the CPA-exam focus of accounting curricula lies in
finding accounting instructors qualified to teach upper division
accountancy, auditing, tax, and AIS courses. There's a huge shortage of
accountancy PhD graduates and many of them are econometricians not
qualified to teach upper division accounting courses. As a result
accounting programs are turning more and more to the AACSB's
Professionally Qualified (PQ) adjunct instructors who are strong in
accountancy but do not have doctoral degrees. A few even have doctoral
degrees but are not interested in doing accountics research and
publishing required for AQ tenure tracks.
Hence even though we could streamline accounting curricula along the
same lines suggested for engineering majors in the above article, I
personally don't think there's a need to meet the supply of available
jobs in accountancy in the United States and Canada.
And apart from engineering and technology, I'm not certain that we
are not deluding high school students about career opportunities in
science and mathematics opportunities. For example, chemistry and
physics are now ranked among the "most useless" majors and students with
four-year degrees or even PhD degrees in these disciplines have to
branch into other fields to find careers.
"Texas May Cut Almost Half of Undergrad Physics Programs," Inside
Higher Ed, September 27, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/27/qt#271341
Note that "useless" in context means an oversupply of graduates relative to
job opportunities in a discipline. The jobs themselves may be high paying,
but 300 may apply for a single opening such that the 299 that got turned
away wish they'd majored in some other discipline.
As college
seniors prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the
numbers to determine which majors—from journalism to psychology
—didn’t pay.
Some
cities are better than others for
college graduates. Some college courses are
definitely hotter than others. Even
some iPhone apps are
better for college
students than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only
one question that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and
dining halls across the nation: What’s your major?
Slide Show
01.Journalism
02. Horticulture
03. Agriculture
04. Advertising
05. Fashion Design
06. Child and Family Studies
07. Music
08. Mechanical Engineering Technology
(but not Mechanical Engineering per se)
09.
Chemistry
10. Nutrition
11. Human Resources
12. Theatre
13. Art History
14. Photography
15. Literature
16. Art
17.Fine Arts
18. Psychology
19. English
20. Animal Science
"Deloitte Commits $60
Million in Pro Bono Services to Nonprofit Organizations: New
Pledge Totals $110 Million to Make Communities Stronger and Advance Key
Women/Girls, Education and Human Service Organizations,"
MarketWatch, April 6, 2012 ---
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/deloitte-commits-60-million-in-pro-bono-services-to-nonprofit-organizations-2012-04-06
Career Options for Women (developed in Canada) ---
http://careeroptions.org/careeroptions/english_index.htm
GirlGeeks ---
http://www.girlgeeks.org/
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and
Engineering ---
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/
Careerzone ---
http://careerzone.ny.gov/cz/stem/index.jsp
On December 17, 2011 Jim Martin posted the following on his MAAW Blog
---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2011/12/careers-with-us-government-department.html
Careers with a U.S. Government
Department or Agency
Accounting graduates should also consider a career with the U.S.
government. For links to most U.S. Government departments and
agencies
see
http://maaw.info/NonProfitLinks.htm
Look for Careers and Paid Student Intern
Programs, or search the sites using those terms. There are a lot of
opportunities available to current and recent college graduates that
should not be ignored.
2012 Working Mother: 100 Best Companies ---
http://www.workingmother.com/best-company-list/129110
"A Degree of Practical Wisdom:: The Ratio of Educational Debt to
Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic
Viability," by Jim Chen, SSRN, December 3, 2011 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1967266
Abstract:
This article evaluates the economic viability
of a student’s decision to borrow money in order to attend law
school. For individuals, firms, and entire nations, the ratio of
debt to income serves as a measure of economic stability. The ease
with which a student can carry and retire educational debt after
graduation may be the simplest measure of educational return on
investment.
Mortgage lenders evaluate prospective borrowers' debt-to-income
ratios. The spread between the front-end and back-end ratios in
mortgage lending provides a basis for extrapolating the maximum
amount of educational debt that a student should incur. Any student
whose debt service exceeds the maximum permissible spread between
mortgage lenders' front-end and back-end ratios will not be able to
buy a house on credit.
These measures of affordability suggest that the maximum educational
back-end ratio (EBER) should fall in a range between 8 and 12
percent of monthly gross income. Four percent would be even better.
Other metrics of economic viability in servicing educational debt
suggest that the ratio of total educational debt to annual income
(EDAI) should range from an ideal 0.5 to a marginal 1.5.
EBER and EDAI are mathematically related ways of measuring the same
thing: a student's ability to discharge educational debt through
enhanced earnings. This article offers guidance on the use of these
debt-to-income ratios to assess the economic viability of students
who borrow money in order to attend law school.
. . .
To offer good
financial viability, defined as a ratio of education debt to annual
income no greater than 0.5, post-law school salary must exceed
annual tuition by a factor of 6 to 1. Adequate financial viability
is realized when annual salary matches or exceeds three years of law
school tuition. A marginal, arguably minimally acceptable level of
financial viability requires a salary that is equal to two years’
tuition. The following table compares some tuition benchmarks with
the salary needed to ensure the good, adequate, and marginal levels
of financial viability identified in this article:
Jensen Comment
This type of study, in my viewpoint, has some relevancy for professional
schools beyond the bachelors degree. However, I would not recommend this
type of analysis for students contemplating where to go after high
school. In the first four years, students get much more out of college
than career opportunities. There are liberal education quality
considerations, greatness of faculty considerations, socialization
experiences, dating, dorm living, and intimacy often leading to
marriage. Often more expensive schools have more to offer beyond the
classroom experience. By the time students are more mature after
graduation from college, the importance of some of these
"extracurricular" experiences often diminishes.
And if we look at post-graduate law, medicine, engineering, and
business schools, the job opportunities and salary expectations are not
independent of the halo effect of where the candidate graduated.
Diplomas from Harvard and Yale Law Schools add a great deal to salary
expectations. And there are huge advantages of being able to network
with alumni who often pave the way for job opportunities. What I'm
saying is going to a law school having a tuition of $60,000 may well be
worth it to graduates who take full advantage of the "extracurricular"
opportunities such as networking with alumni. And for all practical
purposes you can never be a U.S. Supreme Court justice unless you either
graduated from Harvard or Yale law schools or were on the faculty at one
of those law schools.
In other words, if you can swing it go to Yale Law school rather than
UCON (sorry Amy).
EGADS. I'm a snob.
Great Science For Girls ---
http://www.greatscienceforgirls.org/
Try Engineering ---
http://www.tryengineering.org
"Telling It as It Is (to new first-year students), by Craig
Stark, Inside Higher Ed, June 6, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/06/essay_on_how_honest_professors_should_be_to_students_about_the_economy
Jensen Comment
This article, perhaps appropriately, does not go into the ins and outs
of choosing a major upon arrival at a college or university. With a few
exceptions, this is perhaps a good idea except in certain majors where
there prerequisite first-year courses are essential such as in
engineering and pre-med. For accounting, the prerequisite first courses
can usually be delayed until the sophomore year. But the above article
really does not deal with choosing a major early on before students
learn a lot about education and careers during their first year on
campus. Much of what they learn comes from informal interactions with
students who are in their second, third, fourth, and higher levels of
study. I think it's a mistake for general curriculum teachers to try to
sell students on particular types of majors or particular types of
politics. Let students sort these things out for themselves as they
advance through the first and even the second years of study.
This article does talk about debt loads. I personally think that
students in the first term of college should learn about personal
finance, tax issues, and debt risk since many of them will make horrible
mistakes in college and after college.
Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Advice and Bibliography for Accounting Ph.D. Students and New Faculty by
James Martin ---
http://maaw.info/AdviceforAccountingPhDstudentsMain.htm
"So you want to get a Ph.D.?" by David Wood, BYU ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=So_you_want_to_get_a_Ph.D.%3F
Why accountancy doctoral programs are drying up and why
accountancy is no longer
required for admission or graduation in an accountancy doctoral program
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Bob Jensen's threads on what went wrong with "accountics research" can be
found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
"The Value of a Humanities Degree: Six Students' Views," by
Jackie Basu et al., Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 2011
---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Value-of-a-Humanities/127758/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
"Toward a Plausible Rationale for the Humanities," by Frank
Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/towards-a-plausible-rationale-for-the-humanities/29565?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on Humanities Versus Business ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#HumanitiesVsBusiness
Accounting, Finance, and Business Graduate Average Salaries are
Neither in the Top Nor the Bottom Top Ten
"Major Decisions," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, May
24, 2011---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/24/georgetown_study_of_salaries_for_different_majors_finds_big_discrepancy_women_and_minorities_in_low_paying_fields
Jensen Comment
I always advised my students that things other than starting salaries
were often more important. For example, in accounting the most important
factors are client exposure (clients often make the best offers to
auditors and consultants), the professional nature of interesting work,
and the amount and quality of the training are more important for the
long haul than starting salaries.
Advancement opportunities are also very important. Consideration
should also be given to travel demands (good news to some graduates and
bad news to other graduates) and pressures such as compensation based
upon sales commissions or other pressure cookers.
Also give consideration to the numbers of opportunities and the
locations of where those opportunities take place. Naval Architecture
and Marine Engineering graduates are paid well, but they are relatively
few in number and face only a limited number of job opportunities and
locales. One of my closest friends has a son who graduated as an
engineer from Maine Maritime Academy and received all sorts of
opportunities in the Merchant Marines. However, after recently getting
married the romance of being stationed aboard Far East merchant vessels
lost a lot of its appeal with his young and pretty wife living on a
horse farm in Conway, New Hampshire. If he'd instead become a N.H. CPA
he could probably have great opportunities in the Mt. Washington Valley
and live each day on the farm.
And in some cases health and pension plans can be very important. Any
career that provides a lifetime pension after only 20-30 years of
service provides a tremendous opportunity for double dipping later in
life. Consider running for the U.S. Congress where a short four-year
stint can get you a lifetime pension with great medical benefits for a
lifetime. Of course there's a lot of crap to wade through getting
nominated and elected.
To me the most important factor is independence and freedom of time
control such as those freedoms afforded to college professors. If I had
it to do all over again I would get a PhD in accounting (since
accounting PhDs are in such short supply for the tremendous needs of the
market). I guess in the 1960s I was the maggot that was dropped by a
soaring bird into the sweetest manure pile around.
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html
National Girls Collaborative Project (science, engineering, and math)
---
http://www.ngcproject.org/resources/newsletter.cfm
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