Following up on the post above, there is a silver bullet for getting attention from recruiters in the accounting industry–
it is a very high GPA in accounting & finance.
This has been discussed many times in many ways on CC. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion and I’ve seen opinions ranging from “Doesn’t matter at all” to “It’s essential to go to the best school…”. I think it really depends on what purpose you assign to attending college. You can approach this from several angles. Three are:
- Get a degree in X as it is a minimum barrier to enter the workforce in a particular field. Check that box, move on with your life.
- Gain a quality, deep immersive education in topic X or Y (or many) for the sake of knowledge (and then go get a job)
- Gain a quality education directed towards a narrow/ highly regarded career. Benefit from pipeline, OCR, alumni to gain access to that career. (Things like Banking, Consulting, Tech come to mind)
Also, where do you want to live / work? Generally more opportunities in major markets around college location.
It’s easy to say you can do anything from anywhere. For a certain driven, gifted individual I suppose that’s true. However, that same individual would likely have had more opportunity (and certainly an easier time at it) attending certain schools. It’s also not true for the masses (although the masses aren’t necessarily interested in the same career as the driven person).
@Publisher “Is your participation in recruiting with your Big 4 firm recent ? If so, it does not coincide with my knowledge.”
I worked 17 years at PwC and switched companies a few years ago. Again, I can only share with you my experience that when I helped with recruiting, the interns were almost always from the top schools in SoCal (USC/UCLA). I have a friend who works at CSU Northridge business college that would always complain that we never did on campus recruiting at CSUN. The motto at the Big 4 was that we hired the “best & brightest” even though I don’t necessarily think that was the case.
Experienced recruiting was/is a different story, where several years of work experience and/or graduate degrees trump what UG college you went to but that is not what we are talking about here. For example, we just interviewed and hired a Georgetown J.D./LLM in Tax which is one of the top programs in the U.S. His UG was a state flagship UF.
@socaldad2002: Just checked PwC’s list of “targeted schools”. It is comprised of 450 US colleges & universities at which recruiters visit & interview (“boots on the ground” is PwC’s term). Most of these colleges & universities are never mentioned on this website based on my readings.
PwC does point out that not all 450 schools are targeted for consulting, but your experience is in tax & audit.
Deloitte hired graduates of 600 different colleges & universities last year including 4,000 interns among the approximately 16,000 hires.
I am very familiar with Tax LLM programs at law schools. A common complaint of Georgetown LLMs is the low starting pay offered by the Big 4 in comparison to law firm pay. But I do realize that most end up in accounting firms.
I’ll check EY & KPMG for current colleges recruited, but I assure you that upper level management typically do NOT have prestigious college degrees. Lots of directional state school hires (e.g. Western Michigan University). Other schools that come to mind are Temple, Bellarmine & Abilene Christian.
P.S. Does PwC have a mandatory retirement age in your area/region ? If so, how strictly is it enforced ?
Also from PwC’s website: Of the 4,000 college interns hired, 95% receive offers & 93% of those receiving offers accept.
EY (Ernst & Young) recruits at over 200 colleges & universities each year. Look for strong GPAs & majors in accounting, finance, CS & MIS.
KPMG has 5 core target schools : Univ. of Illinois Urbana Ch.; Penn State; Virginia Tech; Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin. KPMG recruiters “live” at these 5 schools during the Fall term. Did not list or elaborate on target schools, just core targets.
P.S. Odds of getting a coveted internship at a Big 4 are about 10%. Two years ago one Big 4 received 27,000 applications for about 3,000 internship spots. 95% who receive offers accept. 11% in this case were offered.
But it does matter where you go to school for certain positions such as: Investment Banking, Management Consulting & major national law firms. (None of these are positions at Big 4 accounting firms.)
A Harvard Business Review article from October, 2015 shares that if you do not attend one of three to five core schools or from one of 5 to 15 target schools, your chances of getting an interview & hired depend upon knowing someone connected with the firm (client or current employee). Resumes from other schools outside of the core & target schools end up in a black hole & are never reviewed.
This gives credibility to the bold assertions by others who insist that attending any MBA program outside of the M-7 (Harvard, Stanford, Penn-Wharton, Chicago, Northwestern-Kellogg, MIT & one other) is not worthwhile for those seeking a career with the most prestigious highest paying MBA employers in certain fields.
For those seeking to work for a Big 4 accounting firm (PwC, KPMG, Deloitte & EY), contact with these employers should begin by at least one’s junior year of college–although some provide a career track for freshmen & sophomores as well. Typically 65% to 70% of new hires at these firms which tend to hire from 14,000 to 24,000 per year, come from their pool of college interns.
It doesn’t surprise me that hiring varies by region as most of the Big 4 firms have 100’as of local and regional offices and have more positions that there are accountants coming out of top colleges. However, IME having worked in SF & LA, where you went to undergrad definitely increased your odds for acceptance into tax or audit at PwC upon graduation from college. And that is the point, where you go to college just might be the difference maker in some regions of the country, to blindly say to future accountants that it does not matter where you go to undergrad school and you have an equal chance for a job with a “prestigious” accounting firm, is disingenuous in my experience. I live and breathed public accounting for 17 years so I think I have some insight into what type of undergraduates get internships and hired. If we had 40 tax summer interns, 39 would get a job offer. The job was theirs to lose. Instead of googling about the discussion, if you have first hand knowledge of the hiring practice in a Big 4 firm we would love to hear it.
The bottom line if you think it doesn’t matter; I know it does/did matter when I lived and breathed public accounting for many, many years. I am done with this thread as we have both said our peace.
But an important change is the 150 hour requirement for CPA licenses which has led to the creation of many masters programs in Accountancy & in Taxation. This has affected recruiting.
Your experience is respected & valued, but limited as is mine. And that is why I check the websites of the Big 4 and the next group of largest (by US revenue & by number of employees) accounting firms.
My knowledge, experience & research yields different results than those stated in your posts in this thread.
P.S. Something that may support your position is one Big 4’s criteria used for designating target schools for interviewing on campus & hiring those students. Two primary factors used in selecting target schools for recruiting are: number of accounting majors & pass rate for that state’s CPA exams.
P.S. Anyone can google the websites for any particular accounting firm to see the educational backgrounds of the highest ranking employees. Whether located in New York City, Chicago, California, Texas or Washington, no name schools dominate.
In the employer survey I linked earlier, GPA (approximate rank) was the 2nd to least influential factor in evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions, although it is still often used as a general 3.0+ GPA resume screen. Only college reputation was less influential. Instead of rank in class, tech employers as whole said they emphasized relevant experience, particularly in a workplace environment through internships and jobs.
If employers like your resume, then interviews start becoming especially important, rather than class rank. Interviews can be a full day event for new grads at tech companies… sometimes more than one day. In my experience, interviews at tech companies emphasize relevant knowledge. I’ve had interviews in which the interviewer barely said “hi” before starting asking me various questions related to knowledge and skill. The specific questions vary quite a bit from employer to employer and interviewer to interviewer. Some interviewers emphasize simple one sentence answer general knowledge type questions, such as “What is the difference between a flip flop and latch?” or “What is a BOM?” Others ask you to solve more job specific complex problems on a whiteboard and discus what you are thinking or ask you to write a short computer program in front of a group. The interviews are also a measure of how well you get along with and function with the team and if you give any red flag type comments or behaviors, not just knowledge. What happens during lunch with the group can be as influential as specific interviews.
The factors you listed aren’t directly related to prestige. For example, yes work experience can be important,. However, students can have work experience at both more prestigious and less prestigious colleges. I’d expect relevant work experience to more closely follow things like how much the colleges emphasize co-op programs than prestige. Similarly class project experience is by no means specific to prestigious colleges. In my engineering field, any ABET accredited college is likely to offer a good amount of class project experience. The college name itself can be a more direct measure of prestige. However, in the employer survey I listed earlier, employers as a whole rated less prestigious public flagships as slightly more desirable than more prestigious elite colleges for hiring purposes.
Best accounting schools for Big 4 career:
https://theaccountingpath.org/best-accounting-schools-for-a-big-4-career/
Top Accounting Schools in California
https://theaccountingpath.org/top-accounting-schools-in-california/
Referring to post #33 above which states that college recruiting for interns was done only at USC & UCLA for the PwC LA & San Francisco area offices.
Maybe, but of the 25 PwC partners resumes I was able to google quickly, there is no partner among these 25 in LA, San Jose & San Francisco PwC offices from UCLA. Two of the 25 have USC degrees. The remaining 23 have degrees from a variety of schools across the nation including Bridgewater College, Golden Gate University, Walsh College, Penn State, UMass- Amherst, San Diego State-Cal State University, Santa Clara, Norwegian School of Economics, Univ. of Gothenburg (Sweden), Baruch College, Univ. of Denver, Dartmouth, two from Northwestern-Kellogg, two from Penn-Wharton undergrad, Georgetown, Texas, UFlorida & Miami Law, Columbia & Villanova, Indiana & Virginia, and one from Boston University.
My point remains that for those seeking a Big 4 accounting firm career, your college does not matter. Your major & GPA do matter as do interviewing skills & sometimes project competition. And, within your first two years of employment at a Big 4, passing the CPA exam (4 parts) is crucial for those without a law degree.
Go to the large Regionals such as Moss Adams & see the colleges of the principals & managers.
P.S. And it gets more interesting when one exams resumes of managers, partners & directors in the Midwest US.
PwC states on their website:
Interesting that UCLA is not on the list in post # 52 by @sushiritto.
Also, expect to see University of San Francisco added soon. They hired away a key employee from Golden Gate to get their Masters in Accountancy/LLM in Taxation program enhanced.
Golden Gate has a strong tax presence in California. One of their grads headed an important dept. at the IRS in Washington DC.
Regardless, the Big 4 are open to grads from almost any accredited accounting program.
And the significance of the relatively young requirement of 150 hours versus the old requirement of 120 hours to be eligible to sit for the CPA exams cannot be emphasized enough with respect to hiring & recruiting.
@Data10 I’m not sure I agree. The simple truth is that most of the things on a new grad resume will be related to the college experience. And, some colleges just have better programs than others.
I don’t know about “almost any,” but certainly open to more than just the big name schools. But, I agree with @socaldad2002, IMO there’s an added “bonus,” when your resume is being reviewed by a Big 4 or even a large regional public accounting firm and you’ve graduated from a big name school.
Typically, as you know, the most talented tax and audit accountants and management consultants are hired away with 2-3 years of experience, or some even stay little longer. But in any case, there’s a tremendous talent drain long before people reach the “highest ranking employee” stage of their careers in the Big 4. So, I don’t think looking at the “highest ranking employees” of the Big 4 will give you an accurate picture of who the Big 4 is hiring out of college today.
What do the extra 30 credits beyond the usual 120 credits for a bachelor’s degree have to be in?
https://www.dca.ca.gov/cba/applicants/tip_sheet.pdf lists the educational requirements for CPA licensing in California; the listed subject requirements add up to 78 credits, leaving 42 credits within a 120 credit bachelor’s degree for general education and free electives (probably sufficient at most colleges). Can the extra 30 credits needed to reach 150 credits be anything?