WHICH IS BETTER: A BCOM OR A CPA?

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By Jim McFie, a Fellow of ICPAK

I was once attending a meeting in the offices of the Commission of University Education in Kenya: one of the persons attending asked those present, “What is the difference between a BCom degree and the CPA qualification”? A Professor from one of the public universities in Kenya answered: “The BCom gives one a much better foundation”. I remember thinking to myself that when one does not know about the subject matter being discussed, it is better to keep quiet or to admit that one does not know, rather than to pretend that one does know: unfortunately, there are many who do not know that they do not know – as was the case for this “learned” Professor. The fact is that one’s foundation in any area of knowledge depends on many factors. Ndungu Gathinji, a member of ICPAK and a former member of the Board of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), where he chaired the IFAC membership committee between 1995 and 1997 and the Developing Nations’ Task Force in 2002/2003, has a natural talent for accounting: he cannot understand how anyone can find accounting difficult. I know a very successful lawyer who just does not like numbers in any shape or form: he is an intelligent man, but accounting is not for him – even though he passed the paper in accounting that he sat when he was at the Kenya School of Law. Kenya’s world champion marathon runners have a natural talent for marathon running: but those champions work extremely hard to remain at the top of their game: some students who have not qualified well enough to sit the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examinations of the Kenya Accountants and Secretaries National Examinations Board (KASNEB) and as a result do the Accounting Technician Diploma, actually progress, on average, through the CPA examinations of KASNEB, more quickly than graduates: those technicians have a very good grounding not only in accounting, but also in all the other subjects associated with accounting. Often, their attitude is far superior to that of graduates – they are ready to do the extra study that enables them to excel.

If one puts “what is the purpose of a university degree”? into Google, one has a choice of 293 million sites to read about the topic. At https://www.researchgate.net/ the answer given is:  “The main purpose of undergraduate or bachelor degree education is about discipline specific knowledge or applied skills and developing generic skills. The other long term purpose of undergraduate education is to enable graduates to be good citizens and committed to ethics and values”.

When I was studying for my PhD, I attended a lecture given by a professor from a university in Singapore, in which he spoke of the book entitled “The Idea of a University”, written by John Henry Newman. In 1863, sixty-two-year-old Newman wrote, “from first to last, education … has been my line.”  He was a lecturer in Oxford University. His career at Oxford had begun with his election in 1822 to a fellowship at Oriel College, one of the almost forty colleges that make up Oxford University – the number has increased marginally over the years. Newman had written that obtaining a fellowship at a college in Oxford was “at that time the object of ambition of all rising men in Oxford.”  After that he “never wished anything better or higher than … ‘to live and die a fellow of Oriel.’” Newman’s “The Idea of a University” (completed in 1873) is, like most of his books, an “occasional” work.  It is certainly not a systematic treatise.  Indeed, it consists of two books: “Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education” (written in 1852), a book which is often confused with “The Idea of a University” and which comprises the lectures Newman was asked to deliver as a prelude to launching the University of Ireland; and “Lectures and Essays on University Subjects” (1859), a collection of lectures and articles that Newman wrote as the founding president of the university.  These “Lectures and Essays” are more practical and less theoretical than the “Discourses” which they usefully supplement.

“The Idea of a University” is a classic work on university education; it is famous for its advocacy of a “liberal education” as the principal purpose of a university.  However, the nature of what Newman meant by a liberal education has often been misunderstood.  What he calls “special Philosophy” or “Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge” he sees as “the end of University Education,” which he defines as “a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of the relations of science to science, of their mutual bearings, and their respective values.” This can be very misleading to a modern reader who may suppose that what Newman means is that the heart of the curriculum will be courses in philosophy or, alternatively, some rather mysterious “special” kind of philosophy.  In Glasgow University, a degree that can be taken is in “Natural Philosophy” – in reality, we would call it “Applied Mathematics”. Newman’s “philosophy of an imperial intellect,” as he rather grandiloquently terms it in the second half of “The Idea”, is not some super-philosophy but simply what he calls in the Preface to the “Discourses” that “real cultivation of mind” which he defines as “the intellect … properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things.”  This is shown by his definition of this “special Philosophy”:  “In default of a recognized term, I have called the perfection or virtue of the intellect by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, or illumination.”  By this he does not mean the academic subject we now call philosophy, but “Knowledge … when it is acted upon, informed … impregnated by Reason,” in other words knowledge which “grasps what it perceives through the senses … which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea.”  And Newman implicitly acknowledges a rhetorical exaggeration when he remarks, “to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.” The fact is that at the heart of his philosophy of education is simply the capacity to think – a skill which is sorely lacking today across the globe.

Another misunderstanding of Newman’s idea of a liberal education is that he was advocating the study of the liberal arts for the usual kind of reasons.  But it is striking that in his several discussions of literature, for example, in “The Idea” he does not at all stress its cultural value.  It is true that he acknowledges that literature is the “history” of the person, “his Life and Remains,” “the manifestation of human nature in human language.”  And he also points out that if “the power of speech is a gift as great as any that can be named … it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study.”  But there is no attempt to argue for the cultural value of studying literature, or even that a knowledge of literature is an essential part of education.  What he does argue in his lecture “Christianity and Letters” in the second half of “The Idea” is that traditionally “the Classics, and the subjects of thought and the studies to which they give rise, or … the Arts, have ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education.”

This could be very misleading for a modern reader who will understand by the Classics the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome.  But, in fact, Newman is thinking of the seven liberal arts of the medieval university, which, as he explains in the same lecture, comprised grammar, rhetoric, logic and mathematics, which was subdivided into geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. Grammar certainly involved literature, the literature of Greece and Rome, but this education in the arts was hardly what we would mean by an education either in the arts or the Classics.

Speaking of knowledge viewed in relation to professional skill, Newman sates: “I have been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued for its own sake; and next, on the nature of that cultivation, or what that cultivation consists in. Truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor reading many books, nor getting up many subjects, nor witnessing many experiments, nor attending many lectures. All this is short of enough; a person may have done it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge: s/he may not realize what her/his mouth utters; s/he may not see with her/his mental eye what confronts her/him; s/he may have no grasp of things as they are; or at least s/he may have no power at all of advancing one step forward of her/himself, in consequence of what s/he has already acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood, of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building up ideas. Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind; it is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual self-possession and repose — qualities which do not come of mere acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects, is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth, is the work of discipline and habit. This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called ‘Liberal Education’; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, her/his standard of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and secure it to themselves in good measure.

And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University.

Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if everything, as well as every person, has its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction “useful,” and “Utility” becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called ‘a Liberal Education’, on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this person a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind. This question, as might have been expected, has been keenly debated in the present age, and formed one main subject of the controversy, to which I referred in the Introduction to the present Discourses, as having been sustained in the first decade of this century by a celebrated Northern Review on the one hand, and defenders of the University of Oxford on the other. Hardly had the authorities of that ancient seat of learning, waking from their long neglect, set on foot a plan for the education of the youth committed to them, than the representatives of science and literature in the city, which has sometimes been called the Northern Athens, remonstrated, with their gravest arguments and their most brilliant satire, against the direction and shape which the reform was taking. Nothing would content them, but that the University should be set to rights on the basis of the philosophy of Utility; a philosophy, as they seem to have thought, which needed but to be proclaimed in order to be embraced. In truth, they were little aware of the depth and force of the principles on which the academic authorities were proceeding, and, this being so, it was not to be expected that they would be allowed to walk at leisure over the field of controversy which they had selected. Accordingly they were encountered in behalf of the University by two men of great name and influence in their day, of very different minds, but united, as by Collegiate ties, so in the clear-sighted and large view which they took of the whole subject of Liberal Education; and the defence thus provided for the Oxford studies has kept its ground to this day”.

It must be remembered that Newman was writing in a very different time, when the pursuit of wealth was perhaps not as strong as it is today.

But the ideal university degree, as described by Newman, is very different to what happens at university today. A BCom does not teach one to think in the way Newman advocates: it is merely a technical qualification. And as a technical qualification it is vastly inferior to the CPA qualification. However, academics are ignorant of this fact.

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If one puts “what is the purpose of a university degree”? into Google, one has a choice of 293 million sites to read about the topic. At https://www.researchgate.net/ the answer given is:  “The main purpose of undergraduate or bachelor degree education is about discipline specific knowledge or applied skills and developing generic skills. The other long term purpose of undergraduate education is to enable graduates to be good citizens and committed to ethics and values”.

When I was studying for my PhD, I attended a lecture given by a professor from a university in Singapore, in which he spoke of the book entitled “The Idea of a University”, written by John Henry Newman. In 1863, sixty-two-year-old Newman wrote, “from first to last, education … has been my line.”  He was a lecturer in Oxford University. His career at Oxford had begun with his election in 1822 to a fellowship at Oriel College, one of the almost forty colleges that make up Oxford University – the number has increased marginally over the years. Newman had written that obtaining a fellowship at a college in Oxford was “at that time the object of ambition of all rising men in Oxford.”  After that he “never wished anything better or higher than … ‘to live and die a fellow of Oriel.’” Newman’s “The Idea of a University” (completed in 1873) is, like most of his books, an “occasional” work.  It is certainly not a systematic treatise.  Indeed, it consists of two books: “Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education” (written in 1852), a book which is often confused with “The Idea of a University” and which comprises the lectures Newman was asked to deliver as a prelude to launching the University of Ireland; and “Lectures and Essays on University Subjects” (1859), a collection of lectures and articles that Newman wrote as the founding president of the university.  These “Lectures and Essays” are more practical and less theoretical than the “Discourses” which they usefully supplement.

“The Idea of a University” is a classic work on university education; it is famous for its advocacy of a “liberal education” as the principal purpose of a university.  However, the nature of what Newman meant by a liberal education has often been misunderstood.  What he calls “special Philosophy” or “Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge” he sees as “the end of University Education,” which he defines as “a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of the relations of science to science, of their mutual bearings, and their respective values.” This can be very misleading to a modern reader who may suppose that what Newman means is that the heart of the curriculum will be courses in philosophy or, alternatively, some rather mysterious “special” kind of philosophy.  In Glasgow University, a degree that can be taken is in “Natural Philosophy” – in reality, we would call it “Applied Mathematics”. Newman’s “philosophy of an imperial intellect,” as he rather grandiloquently terms it in the second half of “The Idea”, is not some super-philosophy but simply what he calls in the Preface to the “Discourses” that “real cultivation of mind” which he defines as “the intellect … properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things.”  This is shown by his definition of this “special Philosophy”:  “In default of a recognized term, I have called the perfection or virtue of the intellect by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, or illumination.”  By this he does not mean the academic subject we now call philosophy, but “Knowledge … when it is acted upon, informed … impregnated by Reason,” in other words knowledge which “grasps what it perceives through the senses … which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea.”  And Newman implicitly acknowledges a rhetorical exaggeration when he remarks, “to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.” The fact is that at the heart of his philosophy of education is simply the capacity to think – a skill which is sorely lacking today across the globe.

Another misunderstanding of Newman’s idea of a liberal education is that he was advocating the study of the liberal arts for the usual kind of reasons.  But it is striking that in his several discussions of literature, for example, in “The Idea” he does not at all stress its cultural value.  It is true that he acknowledges that literature is the “history” of the person, “his Life and Remains,” “the manifestation of human nature in human language.”  And he also points out that if “the power of speech is a gift as great as any that can be named … it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study.”  But there is no attempt to argue for the cultural value of studying literature, or even that a knowledge of literature is an essential part of education.  What he does argue in his lecture “Christianity and Letters” in the second half of “The Idea” is that traditionally “the Classics, and the subjects of thought and the studies to which they give rise, or … the Arts, have ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education.”

This could be very misleading for a modern reader who will understand by the Classics the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome.  But, in fact, Newman is thinking of the seven liberal arts of the medieval university, which, as he explains in the same lecture, comprised grammar, rhetoric, logic and mathematics, which was subdivided into geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. Grammar certainly involved literature, the literature of Greece and Rome, but this education in the arts was hardly what we would mean by an education either in the arts or the Classics.

Speaking of knowledge viewed in relation to professional skill, Newman sates: “I have been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued for its own sake; and next, on the nature of that cultivation, or what that cultivation consists in. Truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor reading many books, nor getting up many subjects, nor witnessing many experiments, nor attending many lectures. All this is short of enough; a person may have done it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge: s/he may not realize what her/his mouth utters; s/he may not see with her/his mental eye what confronts her/him; s/he may have no grasp of things as they are; or at least s/he may have no power at all of advancing one step forward of her/himself, in consequence of what s/he has already acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood, of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building up ideas. Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind; it is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual self-possession and repose — qualities which do not come of mere acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects, is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth, is the work of discipline and habit. This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called ‘Liberal Education’; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, her/his standard of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and secure it to themselves in good measure.

And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University.

Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if everything, as well as every person, has its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction “useful,” and “Utility” becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called ‘a Liberal Education’, on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this person a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind. This question, as might have been expected, has been keenly debated in the present age, and formed one main subject of the controversy, to which I referred in the Introduction to the present Discourses, as having been sustained in the first decade of this century by a celebrated Northern Review on the one hand, and defenders of the University of Oxford on the other. Hardly had the authorities of that ancient seat of learning, waking from their long neglect, set on foot a plan for the education of the youth committed to them, than the representatives of science and literature in the city, which has sometimes been called the Northern Athens, remonstrated, with their gravest arguments and their most brilliant satire, against the direction and shape which the reform was taking. Nothing would content them, but that the University should be set to rights on the basis of the philosophy of Utility; a philosophy, as they seem to have thought, which needed but to be proclaimed in order to be embraced. In truth, they were little aware of the depth and force of the principles on which the academic authorities were proceeding, and, this being so, it was not to be expected that they would be allowed to walk at leisure over the field of controversy which they had selected. Accordingly they were encountered in behalf of the University by two men of great name and influence in their day, of very different minds, but united, as by Collegiate ties, so in the clear-sighted and large view which they took of the whole subject of Liberal Education; and the defence thus provided for the Oxford studies has kept its ground to this day”.

It must be remembered that Newman was writing in a very different time, when the pursuit of wealth was perhaps not as strong as it is today.

But the ideal university degree, as described by Newman, is very different to what happens at university today. A BCom does not teach one to think in the way Newman advocates: it is merely a technical qualification. And as a technical qualification it is vastly inferior to the CPA qualification. However, academics are ignorant of this fact

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