At Monday’s faculty meeting, the Bowdoin faculty voted 55 for and 21 against, with three abstentions, to approve a new financial accounting course that will be offered next spring in conjunction with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. The experimental class, combining in-person and online instruction, will be administered on a trial basis for 50 students and used to evaluate whether this type of program fits in the Bowdoin curriculum.
Proposed by the College’s Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee (CEP), the course’s two 25-student sections will feature dual instruction from Tuck and Bowdoin faculty—Associate Professor of Economics Greg DeCoster will lead class meetings on campus and Tuck’s Professor of Accounting Phillip Stocken will conduct weekly online sessions. DeCoster will make assignments and create the grading rubric, while Stocken will grade students’ work.
“We are delighted to launch this experiment in learning with Bowdoin,” said Robert G. Hansen, senior associate dean at the Tuck School of Business, in an interview with the Bowdoin Daily Sun. “Both of our institutions have a time-tested approach to education that relies on active student-faculty engagement in an intimate and small-scale environment.”
At the faculty meeting, President Barry Mills tentatively estimated that the new course would cost the College roughly $60,000—substantially cheaper than the Fullbridge Program, a business preparation program offered over the past two winter breaks that aimed to increase students’ financial literacy at a cost to the College of roughly $160,000.
“Accounting is really a language and an essential part of finance,” said Mills in an interview with the Bowdoin Daily Sun. “We’ve taught accounting in the past at Bowdoin, but this exciting collaboration allows our students to take advantage of the expertise at one of the nation’s distinguished business schools, to learn from highly skilled faculty at both institutions, and to use technology in ways that fit well within our liberal arts model.”
Bowdoin economics faculty and Tuck professors will collaborate throughout the semester to adjust the syllabus and content when necessary, and CEP will review the course at the end of the semester.