How Can the Colleges Serve the Profession?

This article was originally presented as a speech before accounting practitioners a the University of Georgia Accounting Institute in 1955. It was published as an article in the Journal of Accountancy in February, 1956 under the title “How Can the Colleges Serve the Profession?” The article deals with the development of a collegiate program for accounting instruction. Willard discusses the types of students that the profession is seeking, outlines a general curriculum and establishes some requisites for the first course in accounting. He goes on to explain the progress made in accounting education. His enlightened understanding of the educational process, as described in this 1956 article, is reflected in his recognition of the need for what he refers to as post-professional education, a concept that has culminated in the insistence on continuing education in the 1970s and 1980s. He also recognized that more participation by accountants in executive development programs would provide them with the tools to enable them to gradually extend their accounting services into the area of management services. Willard’s comments about the extension of accounting services into the realm of management consulting were prophetic when one considers the explosive increase in the scope of services of CPA firms in the 1980s.