Many students lack the financial resources to pay the tuition and fees needed to become CPAs, according to a new report.
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The survey found that more than 73% of the surveyed students relied on some form of external financial support. The main support students said they need is financial support through scholarships, followed by mentorship.
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More than 44% of business administration majors indicated they chose their major before college enrollment, that is, while still in high school. Waiting until college to build awareness of the CPA profession significantly reduces the pipeline of accounting majors, the report noted.
The PICPA’s research indicates that students are becoming accounting majors for three specific reasons: Accounting will allow them to pursue meaningful and impactful work (79.8%); accounting will provide them with a stable career (78.6%), and accounting will lead them to a career in demand (77.5%).
Some parts of the white paper focus only on Pennsylvania respondents given the PICPA’s state focus. It found that reaching out to and educating younger students is especially important when looking specifically at Pennsylvania student data. Overall, 10.5% of Pennsylvania accounting and business administration majors indicated they selected their current major before high school, and 52.6% said that they knew what their major was going to be in high school. Only 36.8% waited until entering college to choose a major.
Some factors come from overall factors that go well beyond accounting. The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007, the report pointed out, and the number of Pennsylvania resident births was 128,459 in 2022, a decline of 1.7% compared with the number of births in 2020. According to the Education Data Initiative, college enrollment nationwide peaked in 2010 at 21.02 million. Since 2010, enrollment has declined 9.8%. College enrollment totaled 15.44 million undergraduate students nationwide in fall 2021, a 21% decline year-over-year. In Pennsylvania, spring college enrollment for 2023 dropped 2.6% over 2022 to 585,758.
The report also cites data from the American Institute of CPAs and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy for the accounting pipeline findings. According to
the 2021-2022 school year, down 7.8% from the previous year. During the same time, the number of students who earned a master’s degree in accounting dropped 6.4% to 18,238. The number of U.S. candidates who took the Uniform CPA Examination in 2022 was about 67,000, down from 72,000 in 2021, a 7% decrease. According to NASBA, the number of registrants in Pennsylvania who sat for one of the sections of the CPA Exam has dropped 12% in recent years.
Meanwhile, the cost of education just keeps going up. Between 2000 and 2021, average tuition and fees jumped by 69%, from $8,082 to $13,677 per year. “The average four-year college tuition cost in Pennsylvania is $48,036, an average of $39,013 for public schools and $51,458 for private institutions,” said the report. “Pennsylvania has the eighth-most-expensive college costs in the country.”
The report recommends reaching out to students early in their education, as soon as high school.
“According to our research, nearly half of non-accounting business majors have chosen a major by their first year of college,” said the report. “Nationwide, the best time to influence students to choose accounting as their major is before college enrollment (high school) when many make their choice of major. A third of accounting majors report choosing their major before
entering college. The necessity of reaching out to high school students and influencing the decision to major in accounting is even greater when you look at responses from business administration majors. More than 44% of business administration majors indicated that they chose their major before college enrollment (high school). Waiting until college to build awareness significantly shrinks the accounting major pipeline.”
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