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Maintaining professional interaction and relevant practical experience: several key elements go into establishing a successful faculty internship program and ensuring its relevance and success for the long term.

Article Excerpt
In recent years, business education has come under fire for not adapting quickly enough to the dynamic business environment for which their graduates are being prepared. Graduates are said to lack the "practical skills needed" to function in the real world. Fault has been laid at the feet of (1) outdated business school curricula, (2) irrelevant faculty research, (3) old-fashioned pedagogy, and (4) faculty skills that are not aligned with the rapidly changing needs of business. (1)

Accounting programs have not escaped criticism. Declining enrollments combined with the changing needs of employers have prompted serious warnings by multiple professional organizations that accounting education needs to keep up with the times. One study designed to foster change, Accounting Education: Charting the Course through a Perilous Future, sponsored by four major accounting groups (the Institute of Management Accountants, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, American Accounting Association, and the then Big 5 accounting firms), stated that it is now time for accounting education to transform itself, and failure to do so "could prove fatal." (2) One of several problems noted with accounting education is that accounting faculty are often isolated from business-school peers and business professionals. This results in faculty who are "out of touch with market and competitive expectations." (3) The study's authors, Steve W. Albrecht and Albert J. Sack, also stress the common theme that accounting faculty must stay engaged with the fast-paced, ever-changing world of business in some form. Their recommendations include consulting engagements or faculty internships.

AACSB International (the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) has also been an instrument of change within the education environment. A Faculty Leadership Task Force was formed in spring 1995 and charged with (1) identifying the issues and problems that keep faculty members from providing leadership for changes in management education, (2) outlining alternate strategies and tactics to overcome these problems, and (3) identifying specific actions that facilitate each of these strategies. According to the task force, the primary problem leading to management education's failure to keep up with the business world is that faculty skills are not aligned with the rapidly changing needs of business. (4) The first of four recommended solutions to this problem was to develop closer links to business and technology, with faculty internships being a primary means of carrying out this solution. The task force felt that faculty internships would assist faculty members in gaining a better understanding of the operating environment and the issues that practitioners face.

The June 23, 2003, revision of the AACSB standards for accounting accreditation reflects this focus on the need for closer faculty links with practitioners. Standard 36 requires that "all accounting academic unit faculty must demonstrate sufficient ongoing professional interaction to support their role in achieving the accounting academic unit's mission and each program's educational objectives." It goes on to require that "the accounting faculty as a whole maintains a portfolio of relevant practical experience in business and accounting consistent with the accounting academic unit's mission and each program's educational objectives" (emphasis added).

It is clearly important to quality accounting education that accounting faculty maintain close ties to the practicing profession. Formal programs designed to create such professional interaction and practical experiences provide an effective way to encourage and document such activities. In addition, such programs are also an excellent means of maintaining the required "portfolio" of relevant practical experience needed for accounting accreditation.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA

The University of Southern Indiana (USI) Department of Accounting and Business Law established a formal Faculty Internship Program in 1999 to help provide relevant practical experience to accounting faculty. The program was operated with the support of the "Accounting Circle," an advisory board to the accounting programs. Now called the Faculty Involvement Program, it was established with the goal of placing one accounting faculty member per year in an extended practical work experience environment. Over time, this would build a "portfolio" of "relevant practical experience" for the accounting faculty as a whole.

Now in its fifth year of successful operation, the challenge is to keep the program operating successfully over the long term. As some faculty members have participated more than once and others are not interested in a formal internship, the mature program is turning its focus toward a broadened emphasis that goes beyond a traditional faculty internship program. The new focus is to promote the general goal of faculty interaction with the practicing profession (which includes more than just faculty internships), and this revised focus will allow the...

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