Victoria Shoaf will be honored at the Moynihan Scholarship Fund Gala on May 24. Information about the event is available here, and tickets are available here.

The Outstanding CPA in Education Award is named for the late Dr. Emanuel Saxe, a former teacher at Baruch College, who was nationally known as a specialist in accounting theory, auditing and fiduciary accounting, and served as an NYSSCPA vice president, executive board member and director, as well as the managing editor of The CPA Journal for 10 years.

Victoria Shoaf, winner of this year’s Dr. Emanuel Saxe Outstanding CPA in Education Award, has taught aspiring CPAs at St. John’s University in Queens for more than two decades. Over this time, she has become keenly aware of both the rapid change the profession is undergoing as well as the need for accounting education to change with it.

“I think one of the problems is that you’re training students today for jobs that don’t really exist. Because it’s evolving so quickly that when you’re working 10 years from now, what they will be doing is probably totally different from what people are doing today,” she said.

Shoaf, originally an English major, first entered the field not as an accountant but as a typist in an accounting department. Her employers thought she had an aptitude for the field and paid for her to get an MBA at Pace University. After a career in industry, Shoaf, seeking a better work-life balance after starting a family, decided teaching would allow her to have the balance she sought. But then she found that, if she wanted to teach, the college would require her to get a Ph.D. 

“So I said all right. How hard can that be?” she said with a laugh.

She earned her Ph.D. from Baruch College in 1997 and has been teaching at St. John’s ever since. Over those 21 years, including six years as dean of the university’s Peter J. Tobin College of Business, Shoaf has seen the profession go through great change, and she has long strived to make sure that her students are prepared for it.

For instance, she said, as the requirements for certification have changed, she worked with faculty to create more alternate paths within her own program.

“We’ve developed specializations where you can take, even within the master’s in accounting, specializations in fraud, in internal audit, in cyberaudit. Besides [the typical accounting track], we actually now have a master’s degree in advisory services, where you can just take specializations,” she said.

Recognizing the growing role of consulting in the accounting world, Shoaf said that the business school has successfully incorporated consulting into its curriculum. At both the sophomore and senior level, as part of their required courses, students assume the role of consultants to actual nonprofit organizations. The nonprofits present the students with a real ongoing problem they have, and the students then form teams to come up with solutions. They then present the best ones to the nonprofits’ executives, “with power points and the whole hoo-ha.” The program has been so helpful to local nonprofits, she said, that the college received a citation from the Nassau County executive praising it.

She also said the school has an Executive-in-Residence Program that invites seniors in its honors program to do an extended consultation with a business organization.

“I think anyone in accounting really gets to know things about business because you have so many relationships, [even with] disciplines I did not relate to directly, like marketing or management. So I think in talking to [colleagues] about developing programs, it was evident to me you need to [have] digital marketing, you need to think of supply chain management,” Shoaf said. “So I think I have a general business knowledge which, I think, is not just me but is common to the accountant.”

As dean, she said, she took a similar understanding when it came to overseeing all the disparate academic departments in the business school. She acknowledged that it can be difficult to fit everything a future CPA could possibly need into one program. With this in mind, her philosophy has been to produce, instead of CPAs who come out knowing everything there is to know, CPAs who can be flexible and handle different circumstances. While the curriculum is still very rigid, Shoaf said there is an active effort to loosen it up by offering more electives. She noted that, today, there’s so much information easily accessible to students that “maybe you don’t need to go into things to the level of painful detail we’ve done in the past.”

Beyond responding to changes in what CPAs actually do, she has also felt the need to respond to changes in who becomes a CPA in the first place.

“I think it’s always a challenge to maintain a good pipeline. I think accounting has had a bad problem at least for 40 years with having that pipeline be diverse and inclusive,” Shoaf said.

With this in mind, she has fostered numerous programs aimed at providing resources and support for young people entering the field.

Shoaf launched the St. John’s CPA Reimbursement Program, which give students the ability to purchase a reduced price CPA review program from the school and then receive reimbursement once they pass. This program led to a significant increase in exam pass rates among students and recent alumni. She assisted in creating the Accounting Scholars Program, which provides networking and internship opportunities to honors accounting majors during their fourth year of study. She also supported the development of the Global Destination Course program to let students travel internationally for a 7– to 10-day period and give students who couldn’t study abroad for a semester the ability to gain an international perspective of their own.

Right now, a big part of her focus is in shifting how the university prepares students for the CPA exam. She noted that the exam is becoming more focused on real-life problems versus abstract technical issues. The accounting program, she believes, must change to reflect this development.

“So, I have raised this issue several times in department meetings that we need to get some way to train them on simulations, and I think it’s important. [The students] hate cases because there’s no real right answer, and they’re accountants; they like bright lines. But I … would like them to have the opportunity to train on that because not only is it on the CPA exam, but I understand why—because it deals with a lot of available information and having to pick what’s important, what’s relevant, and I think they need the practice,” she said.

NYSSCPA member Mark Ulrich, a St. John’s professor who nominated her for the award, praised Shoaf for her tireless advocacy for her students and desire to do everything she can to help them succeed.

“Dr. Shoaf has completed 21 years of unmatched service to accounting education,” he said. “The list of her contributions is without end, as is the list of students who have been positively affected by her hard work and dedication.”