My experience with doctoral rankings (especially accounting)

Let me clarify a few things.

1) All PhD programs are intended for people who will stay in academia after they graduate, and as such are for people willing to both do research AND teach. Tenure criteria at almost every school also reflect that -- you need to have published 'good' research to get tenure, and you need 'good' course evaluations to get tenure. However, because sometimes to publish better quality (or quantity) research you need to cut back on course preparation, sometimes you need to make a choice between the two. As a result people are forced to make choices as to whether they value an article in an 'A' journal more than better case studies in Corporate Reporting 201, and those who run business schools (and accounting departments) have their own biases as to which is more important: teaching or research.

2) It's not so much a question of formal program requirements and structure (so will normally not show up on program websites), but a question of culture. I should shortly receive a PhD from a school that had a teaching requirement as well as (obviously) various research milestones as formal requirements to receive the degree. No matter how poorly I could have fared during my (1-semester, 1-class) teaching requirement, I would still get my degree if the research is good enough. However, I had to make many corrections on my research papers to get a 'pass' while some of my summer papers may have been good enough for a dissertation at some (much lesser) schools. Other schools might have the same requirements on paper, but would need a minimal student evaluation score to pass the teaching requirement, or may require the student to teach every year for the last 3 years of the program.

3) I did not divide programs in any way; if you look at my rankings, there is only one list. I used Georgia as an example even though I actually know very little about the program (it is not well-known for research, maybe I should have said "not well-known" instead of "not good") because it was ranked in the Public Accounting Report's top PhD programs at the time. I'd be surprised if the formal requirements at Georgia blatantly said that teaching was more important than research, and as someone going through that program you might not feel that is the case. What I said is that what makes someone a good teacher can in part be taught during a PhD program, but a larger part is the result of that person's personality and natural abilities (communication skills). On the other hand, nobody will become a great researcher by him/herself, so the best and toughest PhD programs for research will offer better training than the lesser ones.

Hope this helps!