“First-year College students are not permitted to take Booth courses.”
Q: Why freshmen are not permitted to take Booth courses?, what are they doing during their first-year at college?, does this happen only in Chicago Booth?, what about Wharton School of Upenn? and other Ivy league universities that also have accounting major program especially undergraduate program?, I also read some information about accounting program on Harvard’ HBS site and just learned that they only offer Accounting program for graduate students only. Why don’t they offer 4-year accounting major program for undergraduate students?
“Why freshmen are not permitted to take Booth courses?” Booth only has graduate level courses. College freshman do not take graduate courses anywhere. “what are they doing during their first-year at college?” UChicago has a strong liberal arts focus. Freshman take courses largely from a broad liberal arts curriculum. “Why don’t they offer 4-year accounting major program for undergraduate students?” Accounting entails specialized, career-focused coursework. UChicago focuses on broader academic areas until graduate school. If you want to do an undergraduate major in accounting a state university or a liberal arts college may be best for you. Check the school’s pass rate for the CPA exam to get some indication of the quality of the program.
Just an FYI: even if you are enrolled in a college or school of business, you may not be taking many - or any - business courses your first year. Check your schools of interest to see the planned curriculum for an accounting major. Many schools will encourage you to complete some GE’s or pre-reqs first.
The University of Chicago, like Harvard, does not offer an undergraduate accounting major. When I was in college, among the private universities with the best academic reputations at the time, only the University of Pennsylvania, in its Wharton School, offered an undergraduate accounting major. Accounting was viewed as something that was part-profession (like medicine or law), that one would study after completing a more academic undergraduate degree, and part-trade (like automobile repair), for which a college education was unnecessary.
My college didn’t have an accounting major, but that would not have kept me from getting hired by a large accounting firm if that’s what I had wanted. My college offered a small number of accounting courses in its Economics Department, and anyone who did well in the introductory financial accounting course could get a job offer from a large accounting firm essentially by asking for it. The firms had in-house training programs (and courses at other universities) to turn new hires into functioning, licensed accountants within a year or so.
That’s essentially still the situation with the University of Chicago. You can take a few accounting courses at Booth as an undergraduate, just not in your first year (when anyway you would be busy completing Core Curriculum requirements and maybe an introductory course in the major you wanted, which could not be accounting because there is no accounting major).
There are lots of other universities now that offer undergraduate business programs, including accounting majors. Most public universities do, and many private universities and colleges that are not trying to attract the very top students in the country. The traditional elite colleges still generally don’t offer undergraduate accounting majors, and aren’t likely to change in the foreseeable future.
It says on Booth website for UChicago undergraduate students:
“Credit is not awarded in the major for Accounting (30000-30001), Building the New Venture (34103), Investments (35000), Corporation Finance (35200), Tools for Business analysis: Excel and Matlab (36104), or Marketing Strategy (37000).”
These are probably the most introductory and popular courses, but audit is not allowed. So unless you can negotiate with the college to count the credit towards your major the default is that they would most likely be wasted. And typically, Booth course registration operates on a bidding system where senior MBA students who have the most points would pick the most popular courses and professors. And the grades at Booth are strictly curved; no course can have a greater than B+ average. That means if even you manage to take some leftover courses at Booth surviving them and getting good grades would be a slog.
Non-major elective courses are not “wasted,” especially high-quality real-world oriented courses like those taken at Booth. UChicago students who don’t double-major will take 10-14 electives in the course of their four years, so there’s plenty of room for a course or two or three at Booth. And several of those courses have undergraduate-only sections, so that undergraduates who take them are not competing with MBA students for slots or grades.