A recent Moneyweb article poses the question of whether Chartered Accountants in South Africa should study longer.
The problem is that high schools are failing learners and many accounting students start out with significant literacy and numerical weaknesses in their learning.
Now, as it turns out, I’m not a supporter of increasing the required length of study because some students (even, perhaps, a majority) need more time to complete the work. I see no reason to enforce an arbitrarily longer study period on students who are perfectly capable of making it in the current and long-standing term of the programme just because some students are entering with inadequate preparation.
I’m not oblivious to the challenges of education in South Africa. I’ve blogged regularly on how education shortcomings are the number one cause of economic challenges and unemployment in South Africa. I’m also not saying that we should simply raise entry requirements as that would exclude many students with the potential to be successful CAs because of imperfect high school level preparation.
What I suggest is an optional (at the choice of students or the university) post matrix, pre-CA year to cement the basics.
The nature of this course would be that the majority of candidates electing or being required to attend this extra year would be previously disadvantaged. I also see it as a perfect opportunity to make tuition cost for this pre-CA year count fully towards cost in the first year of the BComm or BBusSci course should the student meet the requirements. Thus, there is no free year of university grade education for all and sundry, but rather for those who benefit from the programme and successfully enter the mainstream CA stream studies their will be limited financial penalties.
In some ways, this subsidy could potentially save the universities and National Treasury some money – better pass rates in later years should shorten the amount of time to graduate, reducing other university and government subsidy costs. I haven’t worked the numbers, but it is an offsetting impact to consider.
I understand that UCT, certainly for actuarial students, has a very successful programme of tweaking the education route for this with poorer preparation. I don’t have the numbers at hand, but the results apparently have been quite staggering.
Of course, SAICA has a somewhat silly response:
Saica’s senior executive for professional development, transformation and growth Chantyl Mulder said the duration to qualify as a chartered accountant (CA) is already seven years and thus lengthening university studies is not viable.
Stating that it isn’t viable doesn’t actually say anything. The same could be said against a seven year study period of the current were six years. The same could be said against the seven to twenty (and beyond for an unlucky few) years of study for actuarial students and medical specialists. As it is, my understanding is that UCT students pursuing their CA career via B.Bus.Sci have a four year undergrad degree (and what a magnificent degree it is too) and then a final year of GDA study before starting a three year articles period.
The recognition that some CAs take longer than seven years could be taken as evidence that some students need longer. Surely it’s better to prepare a robust eight year programme for those very likely to take longer than seven years rather than leave them to the wolves and an eight or nine year struggle with inadequate preparation? Or even if a parallel rather than serial solution to improving the basic skills is the answer, this has nothing to do with seven years being the magical “right” number.
The final worry itching at the back of my head is that we have all accepted the pernicious degradation of matric quality and have therefore already become used to lower entrance requirements at universities, adding pressure to admissions and possible decreasing the average level of learning. This route as only one destination – lower skilled employees, less international competitiveness, lower economic growth and higher unemployment.
