Snyder warns his students that tinkering with numbers, particularly when shareholders and the Internal Revenue Service are watching, is strictly forbidden. Profit and loss are sacred, he said.
"It should be the same at the beginning of the year as at the end of the previous year," Snyder told them. "Creative accounting may come up with something else -- but we don't want to go there."
Snyder is a USC accounting graduate and was on the faculty there from 1992 to 1994. He's been at San Diego State since 1989 and this year was named "Best of State" in a student-run poll for the second year in a row.
The accounting program received a boost this year with a $10-million bequest from Gertrude Lamden, widow of Charles W. Lamden, the first dean of the College of Business Administration. The money will be used for faculty stipends, travel, research and special projects.
The program will be renamed the Charles W. Lamden School of Accountancy, pending approval next month by the California State University trustees. The change will be the first time that a school at San Diego State has been renamed as part of a bequest.
The San Diego State accounting program has not achieved the acclaim of programs at better-known institutions. In the world of accounting, the University of Texas at Austin is king, with its undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs ranked as the best in the country by the Public Accounting Report.
After Austin, among undergraduate programs, comes Brigham Young University, the University of Illinois, Notre Dame and USC.
Still, San Diego State grads have a good record in passing the notoriously difficult test to become a certified public accountant. Some have achieved gold medal status as the best in their testing class.
And they may enjoy a kind of advantage when they go job-hunting that doesn't show up in rankings. The school's alums are sprinkled in a variety of high-level jobs.
Among them is David Down, managing director of the San Diego office of KPMG, one of the nation's largest accounting firms. He's a 1976 accounting graduate of San Diego State. He likes the enthusiasm of graduates of his alma mater.
"They're very passionate about the accounting profession, the academic side and the practical side," he said.
Although the number of accounting majors is growing -- from 70 to 133 in four years -- it's still a small portion of the 6,000 students in the business school at the bluff-top campus.
"It's a lot of reading, but once you get the concepts down, there's a lot of logic in it," said Eric Butler, 22, a junior.
Accounting 321 requires 30 hours of homework a week.
Anyone can take an accounting class, but students have to wait until their junior year and have a 2.9 grade-point average to become accounting majors.
Some will decide later to transfer to something less rigorous -- which is OK with the faculty. "If it were easy," Snyder said, "everybody would be doing it."
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tony.perry@latimes.com
