Abstract

Previous research has shown that accountants may be inadequate moral reasoners. Concern over this trend caused the Treadway Commission and the Accounting Education Change Commission to call for greater integration of ethics into the student's training. ;Ponemon and Glazer found a difference in cognitive moral development between accounting students at a public university and a private university with a liberal arts emphasis. This study expands Ponemon and Glazer's research by examining two liberal arts universities, one a private, secular institution and one a Catholic institution. The primary research question asks if Catholic university accounting students manifest greater CMD growth than secular university accounting students. Additionally, this study examines and compares the priority that accounting students from the different institutions place on ethical values versus economic values. It was expected that Catholic university accounting students would manifest both greater CMD growth and a greater concern for ethical values over economic values when compared with non-Catholic university accounting students. ;The study utilized a two-phase approach. In the first phase, an organizational study of two institutions was made to determine how each strives to integrate moral development into their accounting students' education. In the second phase, lower-division and senior accounting students were given three ethical and values related tasks to complete which propose to measure differences in ethical and economic values. ;Results of the organizational study imply that ethical development of the students was an important goal of each institution. However, there is some question whether the universities' promulgated materials and the administration's perspective on ethical development are consistent with actual practice in accounting classrooms. Results of the student tests did not show any significant difference between the Catholic university and the secular accounting students CMD growth. The results of this study did find a weak positive correlation between, the ranking students gave to economic values relative to ethical values and, the number of economic responses to business dilemmas. However, the results did not show any difference between the students or between schools in how they ranked economic values relative to ethical values, nor in the number of ethical responses to the ethical dilemmas. The results of the study imply that CMD growth among accounting students at a Catholic university is occurring, but at a rate not significantly different than the rate found at a non-Catholic university