Apr 26, 2018
Accountancy Grad Programs Achieve STEM Designation
The graduate programs in the Department of Accountancy have recently received a STEM designation from the Illinois Board of Higher Education. STEM refers to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Being designation as STEM degree programs reflects a recognition of the analytic skills that have been embedded within each program’s required courses. They have a more central focus on quantitative methods as applied to accounting science.
All of the graduate programs in the Department of Accountancy now have this STEM designation, including the PhD in Accountancy, Master of Accounting Science (MAS), Master of Science in Accountancy (MSA), and Master of Science in Accountancy Online (iMSA).
The curricula in these programs include substantial coursework in the following areas:
- Applying quantitative methods to the description, analysis, and forecasting of business data, including courses in data analytics that focus on data acquisition, processing, mining, and visualization
- Advanced analytics focused programming and machine learning techniques applied to production environments, the access, aggregation, and analysis of structure and unstructured data sets
- The application of theoretical and practical data analytic skills and principles to a variety of business and accounting contexts