Accounting Program Rankings

Accounting Doctoral Programs Rankings

Ranking different institutions is a difficult construct. In order to do so, you must determine what characteristics are desirable in an institution. There have been many different rankings based on many different things, and the purpose of this ranking is to combine all the rankings in order to demonstrate what program excels at all the different parameters defined in rankings, and not merely on one narrowly constructed characteristic. I combine 7 different rankings in order to get a list of the top programs, using such parameters of perceived quality of the institution by other academics, faculty productivity in the accounting and business journals, recent graduate research productivity, and quality of job placement upon graduation. I took each ranking and got the top 25 schools in each ranking system. Then, every school on this list that was not included in the ranking is given a ranking of 26. In the end, we subtracted a schools added rankings from 156, and the school with the lowest score wins. I use the following rankings:

Public Accounting Report Annual Surveys from Years 2005 and 2006: The trade journal The Public Accounting Report surveys faculty members and accounting firms, and these are the results of the survey. By including two years of data, this parameter is doubly weights, and, given the value of being highly regarded in the field, this seems reasonable.

Number of Publications in Top Three Accounting Journals by Faculty: This is from a database put together by the University of Texas at Dallas, and measures the number of faculty publications in the top three accounting journal from 1990 to 2007. It weights the publications for multiple authorship, and for the number of faculty at the school.

Number of Publications in all major business journals by Faculty: While accounting publications are important, most accounting faculty would be pleased with a hit in the Journal of Finance, for example. Thus, the overall productivity of a university in all business publications is important. This is from the same UT at Dallas database, but includes all major business publications.

Larry Brown Productivity of Recent Graduates: While productive faculty are important, one important measure of a PhD program is the productivity of the graduates of the program. Larry Brown ranks programs based on the number of publications of graduates of the institution in the top three accounting journals 5 years after graduation. This number involves graduates from 1995-1999.

Placement Rankings from Stammerjohan and Hall (2001): (Journal of Accounting Education Volume 20, Issue 1, Winter 2002, Pages 1-27 ) This ranking considers placement from 1978 to 1997 from PhD programs in accounting. Institutions are ranked based on the quality of where their graduates go directly after graduation. The quality of the institutions where graduates go is gages based on US News and World Report: America's Best Colleges (1997).

As mentioned, rankings are a difficult construct, and there are certainly limitations to this methodology. Perhaps the most important is that some programs wane over time, and as some of these rankings are based on how programs performed a decade ago, what was a very good program may have lost a lot of good faculty, and have subsequently become not as desirable.

The standard deviations of the 6 different rankings are reported. Notice that the schools with smaller standard deviations are more consistently ranked in that same spot throughout the different rankings, thus, while MIT shines on some rankings, its poor performance on others lands it at number 17, but with a relatively volatility in where it is ranked, and thus a high standard deviation.

Interestingly, none of the individual rankings seem to jive with the general opinion of programs we receive in the pre-PhD program, but when you combine them all, it is much more representative of the impression I, at least, had. Anyways, for what it is worth, here are my rankings:

Rank	SD	University
1	2.79	University of Chicago
2	3.69	Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
3	3.33	Stanford University
4	4.64	University of Michigan
5	9.42	University of Texas-Austin
6	6.07	University of North Carolina
7	8.16	Northwestern University
8	5.28	University of Washington
9	7.68	Harvard University
10	9.39	Cornell University
11	7.92	University of Southern California
12	8.82	University of Illinois
13	11.1	Rochester
13	7.79	University of Iowa
15	9.52	Indiana University
15	5.79	Michigan State University
17	9.93	MIT
18	10.13	New York University
19	4.03	Penn State University
20	9.07	Berkley
21	8	Columbia University
22	5.68	Ohio State University
23	9.2	Duke
24	6.06	University of Arizona
25	5.71	University of Minnesota at Twin Cities