Accounting Firms, Schools Must Craft Next Generation’s Future

In September 2024, Robert Pawlewicz wrote about how universities were rising to meet a profession in flux. He was right. But 18 months later, the landscape has shifted so dramatically that the questions themselves have changed.

Back then, the headline was a talent shortage. Today, it’s something more complicated: a profession that may be automating the very rungs of the ladder that young accounting professionals need to climb.

Both firms and academia must design learning environments and curricula that will ensure the next generation of accountants develops artificial intelligence fluency on top of critical thinking skills.

A New Story

Consider what’s happened since Pawlewicz’s article was published. PwC announced it will cut US entry-level campus hiring by roughly a third by 2028. A Controllers Council survey of finance executives found that 53% now report no staffing shortage whatsoever, a remarkable reversal from the crisis narrative just two years earlier.

But the shortage hasn’t disappeared. It has segmented. Controllers, senior accountants, and government auditors remain in high demand while the appetite for new graduates, especially in larger firms and corporations, has dried up. Many firms and companies want people with five-plus years of experience and professionals who’ve already developed the judgment that comes from working through messy, real-world problems.

Accounting’s Catch-22

Here’s what keeps me up at night: Every Big Four firm unveiled agentic AI platforms last year, collectively committing billions of dollars to autonomous systems that handle multi-step compliance, audit, and tax tasks with little human intervention.

That investment is automating exactly the work that is used to train new accountants—tick-and-tie exercises, reconciliations, routine compliance tasks that taught young professionals how numbers connect and where things go wrong. PwC’s own AI assurance leader has said new hires will “walk in the door almost instantaneously becoming reviewers and supervisors.”

But reviewers of what? Research from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that junior accountants tend to accept AI-generated output at face value, even when the system flags uncertainty, while senior professionals treat the same tools as collaborators to be challenged. An AI agent is something that works alongside you; it doesn’t replace the need to think critically about what it produces. Professional skepticism isn’t something you can shortcut. It’s built through doing the work.

If we don’t solve this, we’ll face a generation-sized gap in the middle of the profession. That would mean plenty of AI capability at the bottom, experienced leaders at the top, but no bridge between them

Education Is Adapting

The good news is that educators aren’t treating AI as an add-on elective. Programs such as Georgia State University’s data-science-and-accounting master’s program and Rutgers University’s stackable AI in Accounting concentration are embedding technology at the core. In January, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business released a proposed new accreditation standard, A5: Digital Agility, which asks schools to demonstrate how technology is being used to solve accounting problems, not just that it’s present in the syllabus.

But there is an irony we can’t ignore. The profession is growing more complex at the very moment we are compressing the educational runway. Twenty-five states have now passed alternatives to the 150-hour CPA licensure requirement and AICPA and NASBA themselves approved a bachelor’s-plus-experience model. This isn’t a relaxation of standards. It’s a recognition that how we build competence must evolve.

Yet fitting AI fluency, ethical reasoning, and critical thinking into fewer credit hours demands a fundamentally different approach to teaching.

When educators ask me what content they should remove to make room, I tell them, “Nothing. Change how you deliver it.” The old “sage on the stage” model has given way to flipped classrooms where faculty learn the technology alongside their students, then integrate it into principles of financial accounting.

“Weed-out” courses in intermediate accounting were once considered a hallmark of rigor; with enrollment finally rebounding, they are a luxury we can no longer afford. Undergraduate accounting enrollment rose 12% in fall 2024, reaching its highest mark since 2020. Those students deserve a framework that supports them, not one that filters them out.

Next Steps

This challenge can’t be solved by any one constituency alone. Firms need to co-design structured learning environments—whether you call them sandboxes, residencies, or apprenticeships—where new hires develop judgment even as AI handles routine execution. Educators need to embed AI throughout the curriculum rather than sequester it in a single elective. And the profession globally needs to treat the entry-level experience gap with the same urgency it brought to the pipeline shortage.

International standards-setters are working to embed sustainability and technology competency. For example, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales launched its most significant qualification overhaul in three decades last year. The challenges are global, and the solutions must be as well.

At the American Accounting Association, we see our role as the connective tissue, bridging academia, practice, and policy to make sure these conversations don’t happen in silos. The profession that Pawlewicz described in 2024 was one adapting to change. The profession I’m describing in 2026 and beyond is one that must deliberately design its own future or risk watching a generation fall through the gap. It’s on all of us to work together—academics and professionals side-by-side—to build what comes next.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Yvonne Hinson is CEO of the American Accounting Association, the largest community of accountants in academia.

Write for Us: Author Guidelines