Chicago Booth Accounting (Undergraduate Program)

JHS
Thu, 16 Nov 2017 14:59:24 +0000

The University of Chicago, like Harvard, does not offer an undergraduate accounting major. When I was in college, among the private universities with the best academic reputations at the time, only the University of Pennsylvania, in its Wharton School, offered an undergraduate accounting major. Accounting was viewed as something that was part-profession (like medicine or law), that one would study after completing a more academic undergraduate degree, and part-trade (like automobile repair), for which a college education was unnecessary.

My college didn’t have an accounting major, but that would not have kept me from getting hired by a large accounting firm if that’s what I had wanted. My college offered a small number of accounting courses in its Economics Department, and anyone who did well in the introductory financial accounting course could get a job offer from a large accounting firm essentially by asking for it. The firms had in-house training programs (and courses at other universities) to turn new hires into functioning, licensed accountants within a year or so.

That’s essentially still the situation with the University of Chicago. You can take a few accounting courses at Booth as an undergraduate, just not in your first year (when anyway you would be busy completing Core Curriculum requirements and maybe an introductory course in the major you wanted, which could not be accounting because there is no accounting major).

There are lots of other universities now that offer undergraduate business programs, including accounting majors. Most public universities do, and many private universities and colleges that are not trying to attract the very top students in the country. The traditional elite colleges still generally don’t offer undergraduate accounting majors, and aren’t likely to change in the foreseeable future.