Let’s Abolish the Education Requirement for Professional Certification : An Analysis from the Perspectives of Law, Economics and Ethics

A number of accounting and auditing certifications require some amount of university education. The AICPA requires its new members to have 150 semester hours of coursework and is pushing the states to adopt the 150-semester hour requirement as a condition of qualifying to take the CPA exam. This paper takes the opposite approach. Rather than increasing the amount of education needed to take the CPA exam, this author advocates abolishing the education requirement altogether