The School of Business’ Master of Accountancy program saw a nearly 73 percent decrease in enrollment over the past decade, which department faculty said may be connected to the drop in new international student enrollment in 2024 and growing demand in data analytics.
Department leaders said the program is working to mitigate the decline in students from 214 in 2014 to 58 in 2024 by increasing its marketing to undergraduate students and adding data analytics and artificial intelligence to modernize the curriculum as the accounting industry incorporates those skills into the field. Scott Lancaster, the director of the Master of Accountancy program, said the department started a STEM Master of Accountancy program in fall 2022 and that the department has to enroll more domestic students because international student enrollment faces challenges after a decrease during the COVID-19 pandemic and the current political environment where he said many students have had their visas revoked or denied by the State Department.
Enrollment in the program dropped from 141 students in 2019 to 109 in 2020 and sank to a low of 52 in 2023, according to the enrollment dashboard.
The State Department has revoked more than 1,800 student visas since President Donald Trump took office in January. Provost Chris Bracey said Tuesday that the State Department revoked the visas of around five students and five recent graduates, though officials said Saturday that federal immigration status had been restored for “most of the small number of impacted GW international students” following an announcement Friday that the United States would restore legal status for thousands of international students.
In the last decade, the number of international students in the Master of Accountancy program dropped from a peak of 164 in 2014 to just 33 in 2024, according to the enrollment dashboard.
“We’ve relied on the international students,” Lancaster said. “We might want to look at domestic students a little more.”
Lancaster said the program earned the federal STEM designation through the Department of Homeland Security, which allows students to obtain a 24-month extension of post-completion optional practical training F-1 status. The F-1 student visa is a nonimmigrant visa used by international students in the United States, and the OPT extension allows students to work in the United States for 12 or 24 months depending on their program after graduating.
DHS defines a STEM field as a program containing engineering, biological sciences, math and physical sciences as classified by the Department of Education.
Lancaster said he and his colleagues have been brainstorming alternative marketing strategies, like intentional marketing to nonaccounting undergraduate students potentially interested in a career change, which he said may help bring an additional market into the program.
“What I think is changing, though, is the market, who the students are, and that’s who I think we have to better address,” Lancaster said.
He added that the master’s program is “isolated” in facing a lack of enrollment struggle, as the undergraduate accounting program’s enrollment numbers are “very strong.” The number of undergraduate students majoring in accounting increased from 86 in 2022 to 120 in 2024, according to the enrollment dashboard.
Lancaster said more students who would traditionally study accounting are beginning to go into similar fields, like data analytics, because the profession is “pushing” students in that direction. He said data analytics has become a more appealing career path than accountancy because of better salaries and is projected to grow by 36 percent from 2023 to 2033, compared to 6 percent for accountants.
The median pay for a data scientist is about $113,000 a year, compared to $82,000 for accountants, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Big Four accounting firms — Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG — have started to increase accounting salaries in an effort to combat a national decline in student enrollment in accountancy programs nationwide.
He said the program added an analytics in accounting course in the spring of 2020 in an effort to bring an “analytical side” and expand the skillsets of students. The course started as an experimental course but was later kept as a permanent offering.
He added that the program is using decision science for the analytics curriculum and is in the process of implementing it in all the courses to ensure each course has a STEM curriculum.
“The other part is other professions, such as data analytics, have started to take away students that would become normally accountants, and they’ve started to go into that direction, into the analytics,” Lancaster said.
Lancaster said that while AI can speed up the more technical parts of accounting, it’s still worthwhile for students to study accounting because there will always be a need for accountants.
“You’re not here to process transactions,” Lancaster said. “Machines do that really well. You’re here to manage processes and own them, and that’s what we’re trying to teach.”
Oded Rozenbaum, a professor of accountancy, said the decrease in enrollment within the past decade reflects the national decline in undergraduate accountancy enrollment but believes that the program will start to see an increase as some of the “Big Four” accounting firms begin to increase salaries.
Accounting firm EY said last year they planned to raise starting salaries for accounts by 10 percent starting in late 2024 in an effort to combat the shortage of entry-level accountants. In 2022, KPMG said it would spend $160 million on salary increases for its U.S. employees.
Rozenbaum said the Big Four firms were “hurting themselves” previously by not increasing the salaries of entry-level accountants.
“There was no incentive to study accounting, even if you wanted to work in the Big Four because data analytics was the hype and probably still is,” Rozenbaum said.
Between 2018 and 2022, the number of students in the United States who graduated with degrees in accounting dropped by 17 percent, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Almost 75 percent of AICPA members are at retirement age, according to the organization.
Rozenbaum said he is certain that accounting will not be taken over by AI, despite the fears from some accountants that its ability to analyze documents and perform repetitive tasks will make the field obsolete.
“There will still be a very strong demand for accountants, and we think that’s a great opportunity for graduates of undergraduate programs trying to understand where they fit in the new AI world,” Rozenbaum said.
