Optimistic Outlook
Dear friends of the Department:
Entering the third year of my four-year term as department chair, I am optimistic about the year ahead. Our enrollments appear to be stabilizing, especially in our traditional Master in Professional Accounting (MPA) program. Initiatives such as our “Bridge” program to attract promising non-business undergraduates into the MPA program are also helping. With thanks to the MPA Program Office team, we have secured STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) certification for our graduate accounting program. In addition to enabling more generous visa terms for international students, STEM certification signals our state-of-the-art accounting curriculum to all potential applicants.
In research, the Department of Accounting is once again No. 1 in top-tier productivity across the discipline’s best journals, as documented in the byuaccounting.net database. In addition, we also rank first in breadth across different research methods, showing the strength of our faculty’s scholarly diversity.
At this fall’s Advisory Council meeting, we will feature two recent initiatives. First, Professor Patrick Badolato will summarize his efforts to attract more McCombs undergraduates to accounting by revitalizing our Introduction to Financial Accounting course to highlight the “why” of accounting along with the “what” and “how.” Student survey results from Professor Badolato’s Spring 2024 course were encouraging, such that we will be expanding his approach to a broader scale in 2025.
A second recent initiative is the reenergizing of the C. Aubrey Smith Center for Auditing Education and Research. The support provided by the C. Aubrey Smith Foundation, directed by C. Aubrey Smith Jr., honors the late C. Aubrey Smith Sr., who joined the UT faculty in 1924. Professor Jaime Schmidt assumed the position of director of the center last year and — along with fellow auditing faculty members Nick Hallman, Zach Kowaleski, and Saad Siddiqui — has done a tremendous job helping the center to realize its mission as set forth when it was founded in the late 1980s. Examples of the center’s activities include a major conference in 2023, as well as an ongoing “AuditChats” series that brings together University and leading audit practitioners to discuss the most important issues of the day.
With bright horizons for the department, I look forward to my remaining two years as department chair and am grateful for your continued support.
