Understanding Students' Choice of Academic Majors: A Longitudinal Analysis

Abstract

This study extends Tan and Laswad's 2006a study by surveying the same students at the beginning and end of their degree programme at a New Zealand university regarding their major choices, beliefs and attitudes towards majoring in accounting or a non-accounting discipline. Using the theory of planned behaviour, the objectives are to compare intentions with behaviour in relation to majoring in accounting and other business disciplines and to examine changes in attitudes and beliefs between the beginning and end of university study. The results indicate many students choose majors that are consistent with their intentions at the beginning of their university study but some students also change their intentions and major in other areas. Some attitudes and beliefs change over time but the major choice tends to remain relatively stable. The results suggest that a higher proportion of accounting students than other business students decide on their major prior to university study. This may suggest that promoting accounting as a career may need to focus on pre-university students.

Keywords:

• Accounting major
• accounting education
• accounting career
• theory of planned behaviour

Notes

This literature was extensively reviewed by Tan and Laswad (2006a).

Introductory accounting is usually taken by students in their first year of study. For those who intend to major in accounting, the intermediate and advanced accounting courses are taken in their second and third year of study respectively.

Testing whether gender is an explanatory variable in models 1 and 2 indicates that gender is not a significant variable in both models.

We did not explore the potential effects of students' grades in the introductory accounting course on the change in majors as we have adopted the TPB as the conceptual framework for examining the factors that influence major choices. However, using the same database, we examined this factor in another study on students' performance. The results show that intention to major in accounting is not associated with the strength of students' academic ability in the discipline (Tan and Laswad, 2006b).