<p>To sit for the CPA exam in my state, you need to have taken a statistics class. (Business stats works fine.) To pass Intermediate Accounting, you need to either be able to use your calculator or a table to calculate present value and future value. (For the CPA exam, you need to be able to use the table.) But you don’t need to understand how any of that is derived.</p>
<p>It’s likely that the math requirements vary a lot by school. I chose not to major in economics in large part because my school’s econ program was too math-heavy - I squeaked through Calc III but didn’t really “get” it. Since then, I’ve met people who were econ majors at other schools, and who picked econ because it had such minimal math requirements.</p>
<p>Accounting is a popular major, so many schools have a “weeder” course to keep enrollment in the more advanced classes artificially low. There are also a lot of rules to learn, but most of them make sense, so you don’t have to remember them. If you never minded learning theorems in geometry, you probably wouldn’t mind learning the accounting rules, either.</p>
<p>I personally don’t enjoy elementary arithmetic much, and I like accounting. My computer does all the arithmetic for me, and I like the part where you figure out what arithmetic you tell it to do.</p>