How do students without Accounting degree become CPA?

ChicagoBear
Thu, 09 Jul 2015 20:44:18 +0000

If you want to be a practicing accountant, you don’t go to Stanford or Harvard! Both schools have great PhD programs in accounting if you want to be a professor, but many of the elite universities tend to avoid “vocational” undergraduate degrees and master’s programs.

There are a few elite universities where you can major in accounting: Wharton, Notre Dame and USC come to mind. At Michigan, you can get a BBA, but it doesn’t have an undergraduate accounting major (at least it didn’t a couple years ago). However, Michigan has a great MAcc program that they encourage their students to apply for if they want to be a CPA.

Most of the other top rated accounting programs are at large, highly-rated state flagship universities such as Texas, Illinois, Indiana etc. Great universities, but not ivies.