Witness the future of finance at FloQast TakeControl 2025. Join leaders in finance, accounting, audit, risk, and compliance Sept. 17–18 as they meet to learn from experts. Access cutting-edge AI strategies and practical solutions needed to stay ahead in an ever-changing industry. Join the virtual conference.
Like just about everything in 2025, the student loan environment is, well, complicated.
“The last several years [have] been pretty unprecedented, and having the pause for several years…I think that actually created a lot of uncertainty for the individual borrower, so they didn’t know when or if it was even going to start back up again,” Michael Jones, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who focuses on the economics of education and labor, told CFO Brew.
After years of uncertainty about the fate of student loan repayments, things quickly became more certain when President Trump returned to office: Borrowers are firmly on the hook, and with fewer repayment options than before.
Some of the immediate impacts of the repayments could include a drop in short-term consumer spending, including “a reduction in housing demand, in everything from vehicles to discretionary spending in restaurants,” Jones noted.
“In somewhat of an ironic way,” though, these immediate pains could provide some longer-term certainty for a generation of students increasingly looking at undergraduate studies as a ROI proposition, he continued.
At the most basic level, simply knowing that this administration is going to keep pressure on borrowers to get back in repayment (or knowing that repayment options are increasingly limited), may motivate students to pursue majors and early career options that more immediately have a financial “trade-off”—and that could be a welcome reprieve for the strained accounting pipeline.
This, of course, is a firmly bittersweet bright spot. Trump’s signature tax and spending policy bill, in limiting the ways borrowers can pay back their debt, is also likely to make attending college less affordable or accessible, higher education experts have argued, while collections on defaulted student loan payments could harm millions of people’s credit scores.
But if finance chiefs can ensure efforts to improve the accounting pipeline align with diversity efforts in the finance field more broadly, it could be a real lemonade out of lemons situation.
Changing tides. While a substantive change in undergrad majors will likely take “years to come to fruition,” Jones notes we’re “definitely seeing” some students flock to accounting, likely due to its supposed stability, adding that the same is also holding true for “jobs that have that human touch,” like nursing.
Indeed, undergrad accounting enrollments this spring recently climbed by double digits for the second straight semester, per data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit organization that provides educational insights, including about enrollment and undergraduate majors. That uptick is likely due to outreach efforts, like those by the AICPA and other professional organizations, arriving as it did before some of the most substantive changes to the state of student loans this year.
In any case, students increasingly seem to understand the appealing stability of a career in accounting. A June AICPA survey of accounting majors found that two-thirds of respondents cited increased job demand as a reason for pursuing the major, with earning potential and economic conditions rounding out the top three reasons.
We’ve seen this kind of behavior before, Andrew Siclari, CFO of the National Student Clearinghouse, told CFO Brew. In the “boom period” following the 2007–2008 market crash, when college enrollment hit an all-time high, many students flocked back to school with the intention of “retooling themselves,” he explained, thus prepping them for career pivots amid a tumultuous economic landscape.
“I think we see some of the same going on [in 2025], this notion of gainful employment,” Siclari said.
That’s a pivot from more recent years, he added. “There was a time just prior to this, when perhaps there was a little more fluidity, and careers would come and go, and there’d be a more easy process by which I could morph one way or another,” he explained. “Now, people are seeing there are reliable career opportunities [in finance and accounting], and I can earn a satisfactory living.”
Increased validity. It’s a good time for a reappraisal of the field, Margaret Burke, PwC’s talent acquisition and development leader, told CFO Brew.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty with the economy. I don’t think anyone can make the bold prediction that it’s bad [or] that it’s good. It’s just uncertainty, and a little bit of volatility,” she said.
That actually “gives validity” to the accounting profession, in Burke’s eyes. “You need accountants in good times and in bad. Some could even say, during periods of uncertainty, your reliance on your numbers and how to interpret them and what they mean for the markets…your executives become more reliant upon that,” she noted.
Our current moment, she argued, could be used as an opportunity to bolster the accounting profession—and financial professionals can play a key role. To that end, Burke recommends CFOs ensure that their finance teams give early career professionals exposure to a wide range of future job functions.
“It’s super important, particularly when individuals and students are starting out of school, to not just work on cash or receivables [but to] give them the broad exposure to how it all works.”
To really learn “the language of business,” she says, “they need to see all of it, and they need to understand how to apply the whole function to the business.”
Secondment works. Additionally, finance chiefs might seek opportunities to look outside traditional pipelines.
“If we see the enrollment is changing now, it looks like there’s a call back to basics, in my mind,” Siclari said. For finance chiefs, a key task is “ensuring that you’re employing a staff that, while they may have training in a dedicated field, they’re not limited by what they’ve been taught, or what they know. They’re open-minded to what still might be the art of the possible.”
Similarly, Jones encourages CFOs, who can likely be “more aggressive on the hiring front” right now, to use the opportunity to bring in talent excited to innovate. When student loans were paused, that freed up borrowers to think about potential startups, new businesses, or other entrepreneurial pursuits, since they weren’t “weighed down by the debt,” he noted.
While “it’s an open question” how significantly repayments will dampen entrepreneurial activity, CFOs should keep the potential shift in mind, because even if there’s a slowdown in students who are willing to engage in their own startups, they’ll still have a pent-up desire to innovate.
“This is a subtle shift, but there may be more opportunities to bring that innovation in-house,” Jones noted, “and do more of that R&D with internal resources rather than thinking about innovation through the market, which I think a lot of firms and CFOs think about in that way.”