Greg Carnes

Accountancy earns highest rankings

by Joe King

The Department of Accountancy in the NIU College of Business has secured its highest-ever rankings in the annual Professor’s Survey conducted by the Public Accounting Report.

For the second straight year, accounting professors across the country rated NIU’s undergraduate program seventh in the nation, tying last year’s all-time high rank for the program. Among graduate programs, NIU placed 10th, moving up six spots from the previous poll.

“These are tremendous honors, and well-deserved for the members of our outstanding faculty who have worked so diligently to uphold our program’s longstanding reputation for excellence,” said Greg Carnes, chair of accountancy.

The survey, conducted annually by the magazine, asks academics in accounting programs across the country a simple open-ended question: “What are the top five accounting programs you would recommend to someone considering the accounting profession?”

Since the survey debuted 22 years ago, the NIU undergraduate program has been a fixture on the list, with rankings fluctuating from year to year, which is what made the program’s second straight year at No. 7 so gratifying.

“Historically, the nature of these rankings has been for the top six programs to remain very consistent – Texas, Illinois, Brigham Young, USC, Notre Dame and Michigan – with the remainder of the list being very fluid. That is why it was so gratifying to see our status among the upper echelon remain steady,” Carnes said. “We would love to see the list start becoming solid in the top seven spots – with NIU holding one of those.”

NIU is one of the smallest schools ranked on the list, and sits ahead of five Big 10 institutions.

While the undergraduate program has been a regular part of the annual rankings, the graduate program is a relative newcomer. It first cracked the top 20 just last year, entering the rankings at 16th before vaulting to 10th in this year’s survey. In doing so it passed program from institutions such as Virginia, Texas A&M and Pennsylvania.

Helping to propel the graduate program up in the rankings was a revamping of the program in recent years. The changes were made in response to new requirements for those wishing to take the CPA exam.

“Students now must have 150 credit hours before they can sit for the CPA exam, which essentially means they must earn a master’s degree. Prior to that requirement, perhaps 5 percent of our students would immediately pursue a master’s degree after earning their bachelor’s degree – now it’s more like 40 percent. Enrollment in that program has almost tripled in the last three years.”

That increase has also changed the nature of the program. Whereas previously it was mostly a night program offered at satellite campuses, it is now mostly a campus-based program catering to full-time students.

“We put a lot of effort into revising the graduate program, which meant a lot of work by the faculty,” Carnes said. “Recognition like this is a direct result of those efforts and well-deserved.”

12-8-03