plus: where the new entry-level jobs are.
by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
the accounting industry has long worried about the gradual disappearance of the profession – not for lack of need, but for lack of professionals.
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let’s face it – accounting isn’t especially attractive to college students. it has a reputation for being dull, and anyone who has talked with experienced practitioners knows that a job can require long hours.
and then there are the extra hours of study required to pass the cpa exam. and then there are the years of work (and relatively low pay) required to really learn accountancy. and then there’s the cpe needed – official and un – just to keep up with changing rules and regs.
but there are upsides, too.
- ultimately, the pay is good.
- plenty of jobs available
- comfy working conditions, often at home
undulating numbers
since 1971, the aicpa has been keeping track of the supply of professionals with its trends report on accounting education, the cpa exam and public accounting firms’ hiring of recent graduates.
reports since 1994 show undulating numbers as the supply of graduates rises and falls. the numbers haven’t changed all that much in all those years. there were 45,469 bachelor’s degrees earned in 1994, and 52,481 earned in 2020.
the low was 34,719 in 2002, but the numbers rose from there, reaching 57,483 in 2012. since then they’ve declined a bit to the 2020 number, the most recent available.
the numbers for master’s degrees have been consistently lower, of course, but they followed the same general wave. there were 20,442 master’s degrees awarded in 2020.
over the past couple of decades, the percentages for genders have wavered very slightly within a range of just a few percentage points near half and half. today, 51% of new hires are men, 49% women.
interestingly enough, 72% of graduates obtaining associate’s degrees were women, while only 28% were men. at the same time, 54% of master’s grads were women, as were an astonishing 67% of new ph.d’s.
is there a pipeline problem?
the trend was dipping just as the pandemic hit. the 2020 number for bachelor’s degrees was down 2.8%. master’s degrees took a more serious plunge of 8.4%. the quarantines, closures and economic impact of the early 2020 arrival of covid-19 probably had something to do with the dip as it prevented graduations.
but still, a dip’s a dip. and a dip-dip-dip-dip-dip – the consistent trend since 2015 – does not bode well. in five years, the total number of graduates has dropped from 79,174 to 72,923, and germs had nothing to do with it.
nonetheless, the administrators of college accounting programs are optimistic. a solid 58% of academia respondents expected enrollment for 2021-22 to be higher than the previous year.
did that work out? too soon to say. data from the national center for education statistics have not been released yet, and even when they are, it might be tricky to infer the effects of the pandemic or extrapolate post-pandemic trends.
hiring is rising.
accounting firms have long been challenged to find professionals. generally, they’ll snatch up whoever’s qualified. yet in 2020 – again, with covid-19 and all its early uncertainties – hiring of new accounting graduates decreased by 10%. but look at these contradictory stats:
- hiring of grads with recent master’s degrees rose by 2 percent.
- hiring of non-accounting grads into accounting and finance functions rose by 10 percentage points.
the diversity of new hires was also up. in 2020, diverse hiring of all graduates (under- and post-) increased by almost 5 percentage points. the numbers for asians, blacks and latinos were the highest in the history of the trends reports.
overall, the statistics in this year’s report are a little unreliable because of the pandemic interruption. but the numbers follow a long-term trend downward, and little indicates a rush to careers in accounting. the industry as a whole needs to continue exploring what students want and what they aren’t finding in accountancy.
