Abstract The article argues in favor of the 150 semester-hour requirement of college education designed to prepare future certified public accountants (CPAs) in the U.S. The 150-hour requirement for new CPAs is, like mandatory continuing education and mandatory quality review for CPA firms, a response to demands to protect the public by improving the quality of the work of CPAs. Like most professions, accounting has evolved from one which required only apprenticeship to one requiring university education, passing a national examination and, in some states, experience. The movement toward a 150- hour requirement for new CPAs began in the 1960s with the publication of "Horizons for a Profession," a study of the accounting profession jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Corp. and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). By the late 1980s, the AICPA had identified the 150-hour requirement as the best approach to increasing and making uniform from state to state the education requirement for future CPAs.
Rick Elam (Fri,) studied this question.