Today's Accounting Crop: Spoiled Rotten?

Although they resemble Generation X — the cohort just preceding them — in their cravings for interaction with their bosses, the new millennials' traits are "magnified" in comparison to Gen Xers, according to Jamrog. "They want feedback at the touch of a button today," he adds. "If you don't answer their e-mails and give them some positive reinforcement, you just dissed them."

And if they feel dissed, they're likely to walk. Houston says that he often hears from former students, toiling away during the first weeks of their first audit jobs in small hotels in remote outposts like Dothan, Ala. Based on the experience of a single grim week, they might well declare their desire to change jobs. "People nowadays are just more likely to focus on 'I hate this, if I go across the street things will be better' without really focusing on what's wrong about it in the first place," he says.

Following similar short-term thinking, many would-be corporate finance executives may mistakenly be shrugging off the hard slog of acquiring basic accounting skills because they see accounting as boring and lacking in glamour. Of the 140 or so accounting majors that graduate from Villanova University each year, 95 percent to 100 percent are sure to have jobs immediately, notes Michael Peters, an assistant professor of accounting and information systems.

Yet many seek to become finance majors and enter a much more competitive job market on Wall Street, where firms end up hiring only a handful of graduates. "It's like a high school basketball star who's got his eyes on the NBA," he says. "It's the money that attracts them."

Next time: how some senior finance executives are bridging the generation gap.

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