PRIOR STUDIES
Pre-entry perception
Sale (2001) noted that most students chose accounting as a major before graduating from high school or soon after entering college. Giladi, Amoo and Friedman (2001) concluded that 32% of respondents decided to major in accounting while still in high school; 28% during their freshman college year; and 19% during their sophomore college year. Hunt, Anthony and Intrieri (2004) found almost 50% of the accounting majors decided on their major before starting college. Heiat, Brown and Johnson (2007) found that 40 % of students in their survey decided on undertaking the accounting programme before they began their studies at the university and 30% during their first year of study.
Despite these numbers, research reports point to the fact that secondary school students base their accounting career decisions on a basket of negative and positive pre-conceived ideas about the work of an accountant and accounting profession as a whole. In a study commissioned by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Taylor (2000) concluded that although high school students perceive accountants as “professional” and “intelligent”, they are generally ignorant of what accountants do, have misinformation about the profession and associate accountants with “maths” and “numbers”. Taylor reported that students perceived accountants’ work as boring, tedious and monotonous that involve number-crunching. Byrne and Willis (2005) noted that Irish secondary school students perceived the accounting profession as boring, definite, precise and compliance driven. Although they consider it to be held in high esteem by the society it still come lower in ranking than other professions such as doctors, solicitors, dentist, architect, and scientists. Hartwell, Lightle and Maxwell (2005) in examining the high school students’ perceptions of accounting observed that an unflattering perception of accountants was one of the contributing factors to the decline of accounting majors.