I know that various community colleges offer accounting classes, but they never seem to explain how their curriculum compares to the CPA requirements, if at all. I also know that many 4-year colleges have accounting programs, usually generously diluted with liberal arts classes and the lackadaisical college attitude. Then there are online colleges that tend towards the even more lackadaisical and the employees of the organization have prominent dollar signs in the eyes.
Well, so are there intensive, “full immersion” if you will, programs that would take in newbies and graduate people who have a good shot to pass the exam? Let’s say 8-10 hours of work every day, no-nonsense attitude, regular quizzes and tests, final exam that feels a lot like the real CPA exam and so forth. Sort of like army bootcamp - you sign up and either you get taken out on a stretcher to convalesce or else you graduate in a reasonable amount of time having mastered precisely those skills that you were supposed to master.
I don’t know (though I’m interested in the answer too), but it might be difficult for such a school to meet the education requirements for a CPA. Here are the requirements where I live. Note that not only do you need a certain number of college credits, but the school needs to be recognized by the board (not just any old school will do).
My spouse is a CPA and when we moved to a different state she had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a new license. I don’t know if it is just these two states or if that is the norm.
I have taken 2nd year math classes in Foothill-Deanza CC. The instructor checked my homework every day and every day I wrote a quiz. At the university such things were not done, in my experience. I am guessing that for people with a lot of self-discipline that’s not a problem, but then not everybody has a lot of self-discipline. Caucasians have less of it than Chinese, reputedly
Incidentally, tomorrow I am going to make some money. I will spend many hours tutoring a college kid who didn’t bother studying for the entire semester, and now he has exam in 5 days. Reputedly, many of his classmates are in similar predicament. While there are many people who might say “serves the losers right” I prefer blaming the manifest inefficiency of the system.
That college takes a lot of money from the students and from the government, it knows full well that many students lack self-discipline, and it doesn’t bother to implement measures to improve achievement. Students suffer, economy suffers, and who benefits? People with high self-discipline who end up having less competition for a good job and so get paid more? Good for them, I guess. But the overall productive capacity of the economy gets reduced because of suboptimal teaching methods. If we were to teach literacy to kids using similar methods, there would have been lots of illiterates running around.
FWIW… you don’t need to be a CPA to get a job in the accounting realm. It is required if you want to engage in “public accounting” which basically means attesting to the accuracy of financial reporting done by others.
Many bookkeepers have no education at all beyond high school. A CPA certificate would be overkill.
Tax preparation is is the same… H&R Block can teach you how to do basic tax returns (although perhaps not very well) in a few days. In fact, after that little amount of training you would probably be more qualified than a CPA who had no specific tax training.
