Remember that drama a couple months back when the Department of Education said accountants aren’t “professional” solely as it pertains to student loans? A refresher here if you need it:
TLDR: The proposed rule from the Department of Education, brought on by the OBBBA, eliminates Graduate PLUS loans and caps student loan borrowing to $20,500/year for graduate students (up to $100,000 in aggregate) and $50,000/year (up to $200,000 in aggregate) for students in professional degree programs. According to them, accounting degrees would not be classified as professional for purposes of this specific thing.
Some people breezed right past the student loan cap part and got quite incensed by the mere suggestion that accountants would fall into a bucket of “non-professionals” next to nurses, physical therapists, and educators, among others (see Reddit here and here). NASBA and the AICPA got involved and immediately began pounding out strongly worded letters to defend the profession from accusations of non-professionalness (which, again, was not what anyone was saying). A bit from NASBA’s:
The National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) strongly opposes the U.S. Department of Education’s implementation of new student-loan policies that reclassify accounting degrees as “non-professional.”
“Classifying accountants as anything other than professionals fundamentally misrepresents the critical work CPAs perform, work that is responsible for the integrity of the global financial systems on which businesses and individuals rely,” said NASBA President and CEO Daniel J. Dustin, CPA. “There’s a reason certified public accountancy has been a licensed profession in the United States since 1896.”
And the AICPA’s comments in December, from Journal of Accountancy:
The letter, sent Monday to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, said that the Department of Education’s recent draft regulation would be detrimental to the profession.
“Excluding accounting would reduce graduate loan eligibility and related funding for students preparing to enter a licensed profession that safeguards financial transparency, compliance, and the public interest,” the letter said.
Some astute observers (read: some person in our comments) remarked that this could be an unintended consequence of the push to eliminate the 150 hour rule but that’s none of our business.
Anyway, some good news. The AICPA’s strongly worded letter worked, insofar as it got the Department of Education to explicitly say that they didn’t mean to imply accountants or anyone else on the non-professional list aren’t professional. From JofA:
A notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) clarified the Department of Education’s proposed definition of professional degrees for the purposes of graduate student loan limits.
Accounting is among a long list of degree programs — including nursing and engineering — that is not among the 11 fields of study proposed to be designated by the department as professional degree programs.
The NPRM, published Friday in the Federal Register, said, in part: “The department notes that the term ‘professional student’ as used in this [NPRM] is intended solely to distinguish those programs that we propose would be eligible for higher loan limits, as required by [H.R. 1, P.L. 119-21, commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act]. The designation, or lack thereof, of a program as ‘professional’ does not reflect a value judgment by the department regarding whether a borrower graduating from the program is considered a ‘professional.’ This NPRM only interprets the phrase ‘professional student’ as used in the context of the loan limits established by [H.R. 1].”
“Accounting is a critical part of our nation’s economic infrastructure and is a profession that has contributed significantly to our economic growth,” Mark Koziel, CPA, CGMA, president and CEO of the AICPA, said in a statement. “We appreciate the Department of Education’s recognition of the broad definition and various aspects of the word ‘professional.’ As the rulemaking process moves forward, the AICPA will continue to review the proposal, and we look forward to providing our suggestions and insights.” And we look forward to reading them.
If it’s so critical to the economic infrastructure of the United States then why are you looking the other way as your member firms burn down the early career ladder for newly graduated accounting students and ship insane amounts of work overseas to India (or The Philippines or South America or whatever it is they’re doing these days)? Where’s the strongly worded letter about that?
It was absolutely embarrassing that the AICPA acted this way, and I say this as a dues-paying former AICPA volunteer.
Especially since they actively encourage offshoring and AI which is going to hurt the membership FAR more than this stupid definition will (especially since, if you need more than 100K in debt to become a CPA, you are absolutely doing it wrong. )
The AICPA has for many years been a water carrier for the Big Four. The positions they take (and positions they refuse to take) align perfectly with whatever improves a Big Four partner’s compensation. Whether or not those positions are damaging to the profession as a whole doesn’t enter into the equation.
Accounting faculty across the U.S. are discussing how the AICPA and the Big 4 have lost the last bit of integrity and public trust they may have had (generous with the word may) as they continue to outsource our industry abroad claming there’s a “talent shortage” or “skills gap” while lining their pockets, padding their margins and binging on labor arbitrage. Of course they did all of that while also BLAMING academia, which has NOT gone unnoticed. Don’t worry that it’s also caused a collapse in demand for higher education and a loss of faculty jobs ACROSS the U.S. That’s right, they also outsourced higher education too. Don’t think we didn’t notice that. My colleagues and I have been contacting our representatives to notify them about the dangers of offshoring and outsourcing in our industry as well as contacting the PCAOB, SEC and others. I imagine shareholder lawsuits will follow once private and publicly traded companies realize that their auditors outsourced the blueprint to their company to a foreign country where it can be copy/pasted to create a competitor model (as we are now seeing with tech, software and AI), undermining the value of U.S. publicly traded companies all while charging their clients to do it as partners pocketed the margins in the form of increased compensation. Shall we go on? Don’t worry, we will, but only behind the scenes as we contact every elected leader we know. The risk to shareholders and the broader public was offshored, too, when the firms outsourced their thinking in the name of “efficiency,” or was that profit efficiency…sorry, it’s hard to distinguish between the two.