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Education and research in the United States: some characteristics of the major accounting PH.D. programs
Abstract
This paper explores some characteristics of the best Accounting Ph.D. programs in the United States. The sample selection was based on the ranking published by the U.S. News & World Report Americas Best Graduate Schools in Accounting-2006. This publication lists the best 31 graduate programs in accounting in the United States. However, for this study, 3 schools have been excluded, leaving a total of 28 Universities for analysis. The data has been collected throughout the universitys websites. The characteristics analyzed were: admission requests, degree requirements, disciplines offered and faculty profile. This research aims at contributing to the Brazilian literature throughout a benchmarking in the American Ph.D. programs. In this sense, this work enables some possibilities for improvement in the Brazilian graduate programs.
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This paper summarizes the publication productivity of 87 accounting doctoral programs in two subsets of the 30 highest-rated academic accounting journals over five years (1992–1996). Three measures are developed as surrogates for the quality, breadth, and depth of the aggregate publication productivity of faculty in each program. Results indicate that the three indices are measuring different dimensions of scholarly productivity. Accounting program administrators should find the results useful for establishing benchmarks for scholarly activity needed for, among other purposes, AACSB accreditation.
Many studies have assessed the research productivity of accounting faculty members, often using tools taken from such other fields of business such as economics and marketing. Many decision-makers including departmental administrators, Deans, Salary-Review and Promotion and Tenure Committees, and alumni use these results to make critical decisions. These studies often use three methods to assess faculty research productivity: ‘counting’ articles written, surveying faculty members or administrators, and using citation analysis. After analyzing how other studies assess the quantity and quality of journals and publications, the researchers present some characteristics that should be included in future studies of this important topic. The results of this literature review should help decision-makers make more informed conclusions when relying on studies that assess their colleagues' research productivity.
This study evaluates and ranks 80 US doctoral granting institutions based on the placement of their graduates at top-tier universities, productive accounting research departments, AACSB-accredited institutions, and US doctoral granting institutions. We employ two measurement scales that facilitate our evaluations and rankings. Our first scale uses US News and World Report: America's Best Colleges (1997) information to measure the placement of each degree granting institution's graduates along a continuum that ranges from top-tier national universities to tier-four regional universities. Our second scale uses research productivity information reported by Hasselback and Reinstein [Hasselback, J. R., & Reinstein, A. (1995a). A proposal for measuring scholarly productivity of accounting faculty. Issues in Accounting Education, 10, 269–306.] to measure the placement of each degree granting institution's graduates along a continuum that ranges from placements in the most productive accounting research departments to placements in the least productive research departments. The primary purpose of our study is to provide potential doctoral students and those advising potential doctoral students with a resource to assist them in the assessment of the placement abilities of US doctoral programs. Consistent with this purpose, we: (1) examine the population of active US degree granting institutions; (2) employ measures of placement ability that are based on the attributes of the initial-placement institutions; and (3) employ measures that are allowed to vary over the entire range of doctoral granting and non-doctoral granting initial-placement institutions.
This paper examines the relationship between an objective measure of research productivity in prestigious business journals from 1986–1998 and recent undergraduate and masters business school ratings determined by U.S. News & World Report. These findings are validated over separate sets of U.S. News measures for undergraduate and MBA programs, extended to a smaller set of MBA rankings from Business Week, and address institutions' residuals that indicate whether ratings of the schools are under- or overestimated when research productivity is used as a predictor. The relationship between discipline research productivity and undergraduate and masters business school program rankings also are examined. Results indicate that research productivity is strongly related to undergraduate program ratings with more than 50% of the variance in ratings explained by a school's research productivity scores. Research productivity is more strongly related to undergraduate business school program ratings/rankings than to masters programs ratings/rankings.