For many, it is both an economically rational and financially mature decision. There are many paths to success and many do not go thru a low tiered regional or private school. Perhaps students or their parents have become more sophisticated in evaluating the costs/benefits of such an experience.
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Exactly. One issue is that university has become so expensive in the US that parents and students need to think carefully about the best way to get the best use of such a large financial investment.
Where I work (in high tech, part time only since I am mostly retired) we are seeing and have seen for a few years an increasing number of very excellent students graduating from in-state public universities. We are also seeing students who get an affordable bachelorâs degree (either in-state, or more often in-country when this is not the US) and who then get a masterâs degree from either a âhighly selectiveâ university or at least a university in the US that is known for their major.
To me, âhighly selective private colleges and state flagshipsâ does indeed seem to be where the interest is. If I were the president of a lower ranked private university in the US, I think that I would be worried.
A nurse manager who I know is still hiring largely from mid level in-state public universities (not just the flagship).
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Yes, nurses and teachers seem to be the major employed result of those sort of regional lower level schools. Accountants, too, if they can pass the CPA exam. That is fine for those who wish to pursue that path but for others it may not make sense to attend.
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Huh? What is the evidence that it is elitism in academia that keeps them from being nimble and adaptive? I think many of these institutions lack the vision to adapt (and donât want to be nimble). This has nothing to do with elitism- itâs poor leadership.
I have a friend who is a senior administrator at a âlower tierâ public institution. Her university is thriving. They went to an online hybrid model years before Covid and Zoom (basically the old fashioned âprofessor tapes the lecture, students watch the videoâ ) and so now it is institutionalized even as the technology has gotten better and even as professors now realize they can integrate slides and more captive communication into their classes. They proliferated all the disciplines that the elite institutions (contrary to your point) wonât touch- BS in Forensic Science, BA in Criminal Justice, BS in Public Safety. You wonât see the elites go near these subjects. You can question why someone needs a BA in Criminal Justice to get a job as a probation officer-- but the reality is that some jurisdictions require a degree, and so a kid might as well get one cheaply from a public institution rather than from for-profit colleges (which practice predatory financial and some unethical behaviors).
This institution is thriving. They are nimble and have adapted to market forces. Someone wants a BA but works fulltime? Lots of classes at night or online. Someone is commuting from home, has no dorm to crash in during the day but has a three hour gap between one class and the next? Ample lounges, private study rooms, a conference center (not fancy, but with small offices, conference rooms with doors that shut) for students to use instead of the dorm room they donât have and canât afford.
It can be done. It isnât elitism that holds an institution back- itâs lack of vision.
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By elitism, I am referring to the attitudes of many faculty who will not support the types of reforms you have outlined. They do not want to be seen as a âvocational institutionâ nor do they want to retool or revisit old practices etc. The inertia is entrenched, under the guise of âhigh academic standardsâ.
If our university and others like us adopted what you outlined above, we would not have the issues we are currently facing.
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Agreed, but it really depends on how you use it and what oneâs expectations are. If you spend enough time around here, youâd think that the only thing people want, or should want, out of college, is to wind up in elite positions that remunerate at the top 1% so that debt can be handled safely. Weâve discussed a few times that the Big 4 recruit from literally anywhere with an accredited accounting program. From that platform you can wind up in a variety of very high paying, and dare I say elite, positions. For the kid attending Western Washington University and studying CS or accounting, they will have options in Seattleâs professional services market. Those are just facts as I observe them all the time.
Edit: I missed your subsequent post outlining at least the accounting track. I would add CS to that as well.
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Worse than âhighly selectiveâ? Dripping with disdain and elitism.
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Okay, so weâre stuck with the elevating, common denominator: âhighlyâ !
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Selective good
Rejective bad
I think the reason why some prefer to highlight a 95% ârejection rateâ, vs. a 5% âacceptance rateâ, is that hopeful parents and students tend to see themselves part of the âacceptedâ no matter how slim, rather than fully internalizing that the odds are 95% against them.
So in that context, focusing on the negative side of selectivity prods them to see it in a more realistic context?
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Studying accting and passing the CPA are very different things. Pass rates by school. Only a few with significant students have over 75% passing rate.
CPA Pass Rates by University
National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) reports information on the top universities with large accounting programs and the highest CPA pass rates. Those CPA pass rates by school are:
- University of Texas at Austin â89.5% pass rate
- Brigham Young University â89.4% pass rate
- Wake Forest University â88.8% pass rate
- Boston College â88.3% pass rate
- University of Michigan-Ann Arbor â88.2% pass rate
- University of Florida â 86.4% pass rate
- University of Virginia â 84.8% pass rate
- Texas A&M University â 82.9% pass rate
- University of Wisconsin-Madison â 82.9% pass rate
So what do we do with this?
âJunior, itâs going to be a sacrifice to send you to Western Washington University. If you were to agree to study accounting and get a job at Deloitte or KPMG, we would do it. But the CPA passage rate for Western students is below 82.9%, and we canât afford to send you to Wisconsin. So, Iâm going to need you to stay at the shop and apprentice with me.â
Is that how that conversation is supposed to go? I understand the point that others have made about attending a mid-tier private law school (Seattle U, for example) and loading up six-figures of debt based on the assumption that you will be in the top 3% of your class and land a job at Perkins Coie. Completely agree with that. But attending a directional state university like Western W. is doable for in-staters. Annual in-state tuition is $7,761. COA, per the school, is just over $29,000, which includes a conservative $15,000 / yr. for housing and meals, a figure that can be reduced while living in Bellingham with roommates. Iâm sorry ⊠we know too many families who arenât wealthy by any measure who make that work.
Thereâs data and then thereâs using the data to make real-life decisions. Life involves risk. Going into the trades involves risk. Staying put in your coastal PNW hometown that has been economically depressed for going on 40 years involves risk. At some point, if you want to be successful, you have to believe you can make the cut and take some risk. Like Darrell says, sitting on your biscuit too afraid to risk it is the definition of soft. And some people donât have the luxury of soft.
Weâre talking about accounting here. Those kids find jobs. The competition to hire them in-house after just a few years at an audit firm is incredibly fierce, a fact I know from first-hand experience. And the audit firms themselves are struggling to hire accounting kids out of school. The independent audit partner tells this to our audit committee all the time.
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One thing to consider is that a number of public flagships are very bad at serving poor students, first generation, or minorities etc for various reasons.
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Do you have access to the entire list? Unfortunately, I do not (and, apparently, they are not creating the passage rate reports after 2019 until theyâve finished switching to a new testing format).
I was, however, able to find the NCAA Bracketologies that were done around March Madness, using a schoolâs CPA passage rates. Some schools that are not in the list of 9 schools that seem to have passage rates over (or close to) 75% are:
- U. of Colorado: 79.2%
- U. of Miami 70.8%
- Villanova, 71.4%
- Duke, 75.7%
- U. of Oklahoma: 75.2%
- U. of Notre Dame: 84.1%
- Michigan State: 73.1%
- U. of Missouri: 79.6%
- Baylor: 70.6%
- James Madison: 74.7%
- U. of Tennessee: 81.8%
- U. of Georgia: 88.4%
- South Dakota State: 76.9%
- U. of Pennsylvania: 90.6%
- U. of Oregon: 71.4%
- Indiana: 71.5%
- Wofford: 74.4%
- U. of North Carolina: 76.7%
- Georgetown: 81.8%
- U. of Iowa: 74.3%
- Davidson: 76%
- Gonzaga: 76.1%
- U. of Wisconsin - Green Bay: 70.3%
- Stanford: 87.5%
*U. of South Carolina: 72.4%
Interestingly, Harvard, whose men team made the NCAA tournament in 2015, had a 66.7% passage rate that year.
Also, readers should note that all of the passage rates being quoted are first-time pass rates. In doing a bit of reading, most sections of the CPA exam have about a 50% passage rate, but the rate of passing all 4 exams on the first try is about 20-25%. I am unsure, but I believe that the percentages by the colleges are the first time pass rates after having taken all 4 sections of the exam. Thus, one is comparing schools that are passing 70+% of their students compared to an average of 20-25%. Moreover, Iâd be shocked if there werenât other schools with higher percentagesâŠtheir basketball teams just didnât get to the NCAA tournament in 2015 or 2016 for me to have easy access to see their scores.
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Itâs another useful data point. Mormons can go to BYU for cheap too. $6400/yr. Non Mormons pay About double than which is still less than many instate publics today. Donât try to be so specific. Iâve been to Bellingham many many times (from Seattle). Both for work financing several malls (Bellis Fair, Cordata, and other large properties) and they had a Thai place (Busara Thai) we really liked down near WWU⊠I am familiar with Western too. itâs a good regional. Best in the state. Yes I went to Wisconsin. Though not for accting. But a guy in my class had the highest score on the CPA exam in the country that year.
Could it be that the requirement for a degree exists because thereâre colleges granting those degrees? We donât know which is the cause and which is the effect, do we? We didnât have those degrees before. Has public safety improved because of the Public Safety degree? Does criminal justice work any better now with the Criminal Justice degree?
Actually we do know that because thereâs been research⊠and, yes, public safety HAS improved with Criminal Justice degrees, in that compared to colleagues without a degree officers with these degrees (or other college degrees) use less lethal force, act less impulsively, and⊠I donât remember what else but it seemed to be good overall for the public and for the officerâs career. I admit I was surprised because I didnât really value CJ as a degree much, but if the goal is a mix of college level critical thinking/general education alongside professional preparation then Academy, it seems to work better than straight police academy with no college.
I donât remember whether they distinguished between community college and 4-year college, or if it was just âa degreeâ vs. âno degreeâ.
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You quoted CPA passage rates for a handful of schools in a thread about whether paying for lower-tier universities is worth the economic risk. Thatâs pretty specific.
You missed the point. Accting major is not worth much without CPA. Passing CPA is hard and some are much better prep than others. They happen to be major schools. So do you feel lucky going to a lesser school??
I started the thread and it was not about lower tier schools at all. It was about the huge move to quality.
No, I didnât miss the point at all. It was abundantly clear.
Flight to quality means what, then, exactly, as it relates to the other? The bulk of the responses support my description entirely.
I get it. But the accounting profession is crawling with kids from second and third-tier schools. Itâs working out just fine.