An Examination of the Factors Affecting Students’ Decision to Major in Accounting

We conducted a survey of accounting and non-accounting students to determine what influences a student to major in accounting. We validated our constructs using principal components and tested our hypotheses that accounting students would view career objectives as more important, and that non-accounting students would view intrinsic characteristics of their major as being more important. As expected, we found that accounting students place more emphasis on career objectives and less emphasis on the intrinsic characteristics of their major than non-accounting students. The difference in opinion on intrinsic characteristics – accounting students think that accounting is better intrinsically than non-accounting students, and nonaccounting students thinking their own major much more intrinsically rewarding than accounting – was a more powerful predictor than differences in opinion on career outcomes. These findings provide guidance to accounting programs that they can communicate the intrinsic rewards of majoring in accounting to attract more students.