Demand for accounting grads still outstrips supply

New data from the AICPA suggests it may be a few years before the supply of new accounting graduates catches up with the demand.

Public accounting firms express a great desire to hire accounting grads, according to the AICPA’s biannual Trends Report, which tracks enrollment and graduation rates as well as hiring trends in accounting. Three-quarters of the firms surveyed that hired in 2024 said they planned to hire the same (47%) or more (28%) staff this year. And 75% of those firms’ new hires held accounting degrees.

The AICPA wasn’t able to estimate the total number of new grad hires last year with confidence due to “a low response rate by firms,” it said in a press release.

Firms may struggle to meet their hiring goals. Accounting bachelor’s degree graduates dropped by 3.3% in 2023–24, the last school year that the Trends survey tracked. The decline was smaller than in previous years. The number of accounting bachelor’s grads fell by 7.8% between 2020–21 and 2021–22.

In a few years, though, and if trends hold, those numbers may tick back up. In the 2024–25 school year, accounting enrollments saw two semesters of 12% YoY growth.

The encouraging numbers may reflect the profession’s attempts to boost the student pipeline, Jan Taylor, the AICPA’s academic-in-residence, said in a press release. “We’ve seen an increase in entry-level pay, more objective narratives about opportunities in the profession, and a renewed commitment to reduce some of the costs and administrative hurdles to becoming a CPA,” she said. (Is that mention of “administrative hurdles” a reference to the decline of the 150-hour rule? Hmm.)

In other words, the accounting shortage may ease—just not anytime soon.

CPA exam roller coaster: In 2023, the number of people taking the CPA exam surged to 42,626, a high not seen since 2016. But in 2024, the number of exam candidates dropped by more than a third (34%). As much as we’d like to tell you that accounting went viral in ’23, the reason’s more mundane: The AICPA rolled out major changes to the CPA exam in 2024. Exam takers were required to prove competency in the core areas of audit, tax, and technology, plus one additional competency. Candidates rushed to take the “old” exam in the year before the changes were implemented—as has happened with previous rounds of changes to the test—and fewer showed up to sit for the “new” exam the first year it came out.