The Accounting Educator Barometer 2026: first findings
We’ve gathered hundreds of voices from across the world, and we’re sharing the results. The Accounting Educator Barometer is a new, annual, anonymous survey of the mood among accounting educators.
The Barometer ran from 30 June to 2 August 2026 and we collected 652 responses from across the world. The sample was self-selected through Accounting Cafe’s community channels: its newsletter, LinkedIn, promotion during online events, email and word of mouth.
On Friday 23 October 2026 we previewed the Barometer with educators from Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. Paul Jennings, Stuart Pedley-Smith and I spent an hour sharing early findings from the Barometer, whose respondents include teachers in schools, colleges and universities, professional-qualification tutors, workplace trainers, regulators and institutes. The full report is free to download.
The headline couldn’t be clearer: educators are happy in the classroom but unsure about the future. About 83% are happy with their work life, but only around half are positive about the direction of accounting education. When asked what makes their work worthwhile, three-quarters cited factors related to purpose. Contrast this with the 5% who mentioned pay and recognition. Purpose is so significant that if it fades, little else in the data suggests educators would be eager to keep going. And pressure on purpose is growing, including challenges related to student engagement, AI, and less clear career pathways for students to follow.
Student engagement produced an interesting pattern. Most at the preview event agreed that their students were less engaged than three years ago, though with exceptions. One said engagement picks up as the exam nears, another said online students seem more engaged, and a third said it’s complicated because students now face “so many competing demands”. In the Barometer, university educators report the most freedom over how they teach and the lowest student engagement. Professional-exam tutors report the reverse. Workplace trainers have plenty of both. Our take is that learners engage when they clearly see that a course leads to something they want: a pass, a promotion, a job. Working harder at making classes engaging will not do much unless it focuses on what students actually want.
Paul took us through the findings on assessment. Only 45% say assessment measures what matters, against 61% who say education prepares learners well for what comes next. He argued that assessment shapes teaching, so a test that measures the wrong things steers everyone the wrong way. AI is making that more urgent. One participant told us they had already moved to oral assessment. Another had tried it and found it costly and not representative of the professional-body exams.
Questions centred on an underlying issue: what is an accounting degree for? In the Barometer’s answers, exemptions and accreditation came up more than anything else. I mentioned a game we play with educators: we put anonymised programme descriptions side by side and ask them to pick their own. Very few can. Stuart saw a trap in this. Students want a degree and the fastest route to a professional qualification, so universities are pushed into offering the accreditation, and “the more it does that, the more it looks like a route into professional qualifications and not a separate degree.” Yet, he argued, the skills a degree teaches are what employers value most: “They want critical thinking.” Someone, he said, needs to stand up and say, “Come to my university because my degree will teach you something different.” One participant called professional imperatives “the elephant in the room”, sitting uneasily within the university focus on critical thinking. Another asked whether educators should be leading practice, since “if we follow, we will always be behind.”
The report suggests a few possible ways forward. One is for educators to spend a few weeks in practice every three years. Another is a final exam that is a conversation with a client or an audit partner. A third is for universities to compete on mid-career courses for qualified professionals, not just undergraduates.
One participant reminded us that educators’ voices need to be heard, and thanked Accounting Cafe for the nudge. Stuart agreed and set a challenge: “you’ve got to have something to say.” Educators work under commercial and exam pressures, he said, and to “get above that parapet” they need a pragmatic answer. That, he thought, is why Accounting Cafe is here.
The Barometer is our attempt to give educators evidence to say it with.
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How to cite this article: York, T. (2026) ‘What 650 accounting educators told us’, Accounting Cafe, [publication date]. Available at: https://accountingcafe.org/2026/09/19/aeb-2026-first-findings/ (Accessed: [insert date])
