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Resource Guide As much as anything, learning IFRS requires adopting a new mindset. "The IFRS are principles-based, whereas U.S. GAAP is very rules-based," says Presha Neidermeyer, associate professor of accounting at West Virginia Univer- sity's College of Business and Economics in Morgantown. "Under GAAP, if something is not specifically excluded, then it's automatically allowed. But a principles-based sys- tem operates much more like a framework of accounting." There are several reasons U.S. schools have delayed add- ing that IFRS framework to their curricula. According to 38 percent of respondents to the AAA/KPMG survey, admin- istrators have little or no understanding of the effort needed to make the change. Seventy-nine percent of respondents say that their key challenge will be developing curriculum mate- rials, while 72 percent say it will be making room for IFRS in the curriculum. Meanwhile, only 16 percent of respondents indicate that their schools will fund training for professors to learn about IFRS so they can teach it to students. But one of the biggest problems, and one cited by 42 percent of respondents, is that textbooks probably won't incorporate IFRS education until the 2011 academic year. It's a problem that European business professors are already familiar with. Since most publicly traded European countries switched to IFRS in 2005, European schools have already had a head start on teaching IFRS to their students—and coping with some of the challenges. "The problem between 2005 and 2007 was that there were no good textbooks available," says Philip Joos, profes- sor of accounting on the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. He notes that there still isn't an IFRS equivalent of the standard textbook—Financial Reporting and Analysis by Lawrence Revsine, Daniel Collins, and W. Bruce Johnson—used in the third year of Tilburg's bachelor's program. Big Four accounting firms and the SEC are all doing their parts to fill in that knowledge gap and prepare faculty to edu- cate students. For instance, last summer, Deloitte announced that nearly 100 colleges and universities had joined its IFRS University Consortium, designed to bring IFRS into college curricula. Deloitte also contributed support to Ohio State University and Virginia Tech, founding members of the consortium, for the development of IFRS course materials. Resources available for educators include tapes of on-campus lectures and transcripts from Deloitte subject matter leaders, actual case studies, and case solutions. More information can be found at www.deloitte.com/us/ifrs/consortium. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has announced that it will 46 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2009 Accounting's New Cachet by Lawrence Richter Quinn and Sharon Shinn The conversion to interna- tional financial reporting standards may be at the forefront of accounting these days, but the switch over to IFRS isn't all that's reshap- ing the field. The business upheavals that started with Enron and WorldCom and morphed into today's Wall Street woes have given the field a great deal of visibil- ity and turned the profession from staid to sexy. Accoun- tants and auditors—who were seen as part of the problem during the previ- ous scandals—today are viewed as first-line defend- ers against any corporate actions that might bring the financial world to its knees. Educators say that accounting's new visibility has led to higher enroll- ments and full classes, allowing schools to be more selective about the students they admit to their pro- grams. This cachet reverses a historical trend in which accounting enjoyed less prestige than professions such as law, engineering, medicine, and architecture, says Sam Berde, a lecturer in auditing at the Univer- sity of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "Today, students look at a company such as AIG and ask, 'How did the auditors miss it? Did we all get hoodwinked, and if so, how?'" he says. "What's great is that we can work with today's news stories— talk about what's really going on—and energize everyone in a way that simply wasn't possible in the past." Real-World Prep In fact, that use of real news stories in the class- room is one of the reasons accounting has become so exciting today, says Fernando Peñalva of IESE Business School. "Students feel enormous satisfaction when they realize that they understand most of the current issues such as the subprime crisis, liquidity and solvency problems, and bankruptcies." Meanwhile, recent events have made it clear that accounting is about more than bookkeeping; it's about decision making, says Richard Riley, Louis F. Tanner Distinguished Pro- fessor of Public Accounting at West Virginia Univer- sity's College of Business and Economics in Morgan- town. "Accounting is about what you do with the num- bers, not the creation of the numbers themselves," he says. "The people who create the numbers don't get paid nearly as much as the people who know how to interpret them."