At the University of San Diego recently, dozens of students gathered following a string of webinars where the ’80s rock hit “The Final Countdown” buzzed through the air. Inside a conference room, students devoured pizza as a metallic poster projected on a nearby wall promoted a tour reminiscent of a concert, complete with an opening act.
“Sadly, we don’t have any merch to sell,” David Hemphill, a radio host turned information officer, jokingly told the students as he took center stage and welcomed the group.
This college tour doesn’t feature musicians or singers. Instead, the headliner is an accounting board and its mission is to get the audience to sing along to the possibilities of choosing accounting as a career.
The US is in the midst of an accountant shortage, and state accounting boards are calculating new ways to attract Generation Z by making the field more attractive to college students.
More than half of US states have revamped decades-old laws to make it possible to get licensed as a certified public accountant with fewer classroom hours and more on-the-job experience. State accounting boards from Ohio to Virginia are hoping their social media posts and student outreach can educate the industry’s youngest generation about the changes.
In California, the board is hosting a state-wide, rock-themed campus tour aiming to energize a new wave of accountant hopefuls.
“Trying to connect with a younger generation is important and trying to show that a CPA is not just number crunching, it’s a people business,” said Dominic Franzella, executive officer of the California Board of Accountancy.
The unusual outreach strategy aims to attract students like Isabella Fonseca, a 19-year-old University of San Diego freshman who sat in the front row during the program.
“I’ve heard of the CPA and the requirements and stuff like that, but I didn’t really know what it took,” Fonseca said. “I figured this would be an easier way of learning.”
Talent Troubles
Like Ben Affleck’s gun-toting character in the action-thriller “The Accountant,” accountants are tasked with preventing fraud and ensuring financial reports are accurate—critical to protecting investors.
Still, the industry faces staffing shortages. The US workforce hemorrhaged 340,000 working accountants and auditors from 2019 to 2023, including those who aren’t licensed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Graduates who earned bachelor’s or master’s degrees in accounting fell to about 55,000 in the 2023-24 academic year, a drop of 6.6% compared to the prior year, according to the American Institute of CPAs.
Among the largest hurdles for entry, some accountants say, was the fifth year of college often needed to meet licensing requirements.
Accountants have advocated for a fresh look at licensing rules, and state lawmakers are listening. Now, state accounting boards are trying to relay the message to students.
Historically, accountants needed to pass the uniform CPA exam, gain a year of work experience, and have 150 college credit hours on their transcript under state licensing requirements.
That third requirement, called the “150-hour rule,” “is very ingrained in the students’ minds,” said Sudha Krishnan, chair of California State University, Long Beach’s department of accountancy.
The rule gained popularity in the 1980s as high-profile corporate scandals and technological advancements underscored the need for intensive training, according to CPA Credits, an online education platform for accounting students.
California’s new licensing rules, which go into effect on Jan. 1, 2027, only require a bachelor’s degree for education. Students with bachelor’s degrees will need two years of job experience, while those who still opt for a master’s degree will only need a year.
“It’s really reassuring and inspiring in my path to become a CPA because it was quite daunting, the amount of education required,” Athena Li, a 21-year-old recent graduate of the University of California, San Diego, said. “It was a massive barrier to entry.”
California’s new requirements aren’t unique. Virginia and Minnesota, for example, added similar pathways effective this past January for candidates with master’s and bachelor’s degrees.
The changes provide “a huge economic equity boost where the barrier to entry to this profession has just gotten far more manageable,” said Kristin Batson, Minnesota Board of Accountancy’s executive director.
State boards aren’t the only groups doing outreach to make the field more attractive to younger entrants.
NABA Inc., a nonprofit focused on engaging and educating Black accounting and business leaders, runs a career awareness program around the country targeting high school students as well as early-career mentoring and scholarship programs to “create multiple entry points into the profession,” Guylaine Saint Juste, the organization’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.
The Association of Latino Professionals For America also provides scholarships to college students to help break financial barriers to education and an eight-week student fellowship program focused on professional development.
Since many corporate leaders are licensed accountants, the pipeline needs to stay strong to increase representation across all levels of business, said Damian Rivera, president and chief executive of the nonprofit.
“It is more than just about, ‘Let’s get more CPAs,’” Rivera said. “It is about, ‘How do we make sure we have a very ethical society? How do we make sure that we don’t have another Enron?’,” he said, referring to the 2001 bankruptcy and accounting scandal of the Houston-based energy company.
Campus Visits
The California Board of Accountancy’s rock theme is an attempt to make nitty-gritty licensure information more palpable.
While “The Final Countdown” came out in 1986, its classic rock feel fit the tour’s theme, the California board’s Hemphill said. The song, he said, has “stood the test of time” and remains familiar to young people being exposed to music via social media.
“Our messaging doesn’t have to be boring,” Hemphill told Bloomberg Tax.
Universities and trade groups are doing similar outreach about the new laws, which vary by state, but state boards are uniquely situated because they’re ultimately in charge of licensing accountants and regulating the practice to ensure people receive services from trusted workers.
Though their primary responsibility is public protection, boards are “taking all opportunities that they can to help promote this new pathway,” said Kent Absec, vice president of state board relations with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy.
Last September, the Accountancy Board of Ohio spoke at the University of Toledo to introduce college and high school students to the relaxed educational requirements. The Buckeye State had become the first to finalize the alternative pathways in January 2025.
“You need to get professionals in front of kids as early as possible just to show them the diversity in what you could do with your life,” Donna Oklok, the board’s executive director, said.
People can think that accounting is “working in a cubicle all day and just typing into the void,” but the profession has diverse career paths and is integrating technology like artificial intelligence, she said.
Alejandro Garcia, a fourth-year student at the University of California, San Diego, said he wants to pursue financial planning and analysis as an accountant. “You can really get to help people or individual companies,” Garcia, 21, said.
Lingering Obstacles
While the move to adjust licensing requirements is a step in the right direction, “it’s not the silver bullet,” Rivera said.
Accounting degrees give people skill sets to better understand business and pursue entrepreneurship goals.
Still, the profession, like others, is being upended by rapidly evolving AI tools that are able to complete routine tasks such as analyzing data and categorizing expenses. Firms like PwC have adjusted training in response.
“How do you convince students this is where you should invest your time and your effort, given that those headwinds are there and they’re not sure how they’re going to move forward?” Rivera said.
Starting salaries have been another obstacle. The average annual entry-level accountant salary is about $54,300, while the average salary for an entry-level financial analyst researching and informing investment strategy is about $62,500, according to Payscale, a compensation data firm.
The industry has focused on increasing starting salaries. Typical initial pay for workers with bachelor’s degrees moved up about 11% to $60,834, according to the American Institute of CPA’s 2025 survey of more than 1,000 firms, most of which have net client fees below $5 million.
Future Careers
While eating a slice of pizza at the California board’s event, Snezhana Golles said she didn’t consider herself a “math person” growing up in Los Angeles. But she became interested in the field during her first accounting class.
“I like to joke around and say, ‘It was love at first accounting problem,’” Golles said.
Golles, a 22-year-old fourth-year student at the University of San Diego, plans to use her accounting skills to one day help her husband start a business in the plastics industry.
During the San Diego program, Kristian Latta, the state board’s president, stood before Golles and her classmates and told them how an accounting degree stretches beyond working for a public accounting firm, like one of the Big Four giants.
The 36-year-old accountant said she’d used her license in non-traditional fields such as the fashion industry and as she advises women entrepreneurs.
“If you are a person who feels like the traditional path isn’t for you, there is a place out there for you,” Latta said.
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