Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been a widening gap between accounting education and accounting practice. In this article, we present a novel framework that aims to understand this gap by analyzing the accounting educational system and profession from the perspective of the International Accounting Education Standards (IAES). We further consider Lebanon as a case study for thoroughly investigating the accounting educational system and characterizing the gap.

 This study is the first of its kind in analyzing the five main groups of stakeholders in this system (fresh graduates, employees, professors, department heads, and employers) and comparing their perspectives about the competencies of accounting graduates. As part of our framework, we introduce a model that captures the interactions between the various stakeholders of the accounting educational and professional system. We then thoroughly probe the various components of this model theoretically, as well as through qualitative and quantitative studies.

Our findings show that while, theoretically, the accounting curriculum incorporates the competencies stipulated by the IAES, in practice, there is a large gap in how the various stakeholders assess the proficiencies of fresh accounting graduates in these competencies. Alarmingly, employers believe that accounting graduates lack the required technical competencies for the job market, while professors, department heads, and students believe that fresh graduates have acquired the required competencies by the time of graduation. In this paper, we investigate the reasons for this gap, characterize it in details, and propose recommendations for bridging it.

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