Non-Accounting Grads

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on August 13, 2019 Accounting Firms Increasingly Hire Non-Accounting Graduates For many public accounting firms, a prospective new hire’s technology skills have become more relevant than their accounting knowledge, according to a report from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Non-accounting graduates comprised 31% of all new-graduate hires in public accounting in 2018, up 11 percentage points from when it was last tracked in 2016, according to the organization. The proportion of non-accounting graduates hired was larger than that of new hires with a master’s degree in accounting (25%), but smaller than that of hires with a bachelor’s degree in accounting (43%) in the 2017-18 school year, the study said. The report, released every two years, found that total projected enrollment for accounting programs—either bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees—fell 4% to 241,873 since the 2015-16 school year. The 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years saw the highest enrollment—both about 253,000—since the organization began tracking it in 1993.