Truman State takes top spot among college accounting programs

The National Association of State Boards of Accountancy publishes CPA pass rates for varied sizes of schools. NASBA’s data is useful, but it only measures single-section pass rates.

It does not measure how well students progress toward completing all four parts needed to become a CPA. In seeking a better metric to evaluate how well collegiate accounting programs prepare students to pass all four parts of the CPA exam, we created the CPA Success Index in 2020. We based the index on the number of sections candidates passed on the first attempt in the preceding 12 months. We gross that value up to 18 months using the school’s average first-time pass rate, and then divide it by the total number of sections, four.

In 2020, we examined most recent available data (2018) for the 248 collegiate accounting programs with greater than 60 candidates that NASBA defines as “large.” We found that candidates in that group passed an average of 1.16 sections per year on the first attempt. Thus, the average candidate from the nation’s largest accounting programs completed just over one-quarter of the exam on the first try in a year’s time, a first-time completion rate that is far below the average of 2.67 parts per year necessary to pass the entire exam successfully within 18 months and become a CPA. We ranked the top 10 large accounting programs by success indices and looked closer at their defining characteristics. We concluded that extra graduate coursework and formalized CPA review lead to higher CPA success scores.

This year, we examine the data in the 2019 NASBA release and expand our analysis to incorporate all accounting programs with greater than 20 candidates, now including 521 programs defined as large or medium-sized by NASBA. The expanded analysis eliminates a bias toward large public universities. We do not evaluate small programs (20 or fewer candidates) because their results can be significantly affected by individual scores. Thus, their results are susceptible to high annual volatility.

For this testing window, Truman State University, a medium-sized program, is ranked number one overall, with an index of 1.000. Truman State’s 37 candidates passed 99 sections during the calendar year, or an average of 2.67 sections per candidate. When the annual pass rate is adjusted to reflect the 18-month testing window, Truman State’s success index is 1.000, indicating that the university’s candidates can be expected to pass all four sections of the CPA exam within the 18-month testing window. A full list of the top 10 is below.

On average, students across all universities only passed one section of the CPA Exam on the first try in 2019, which results in an average CPA success index of .397 (median of .375), a far cry from passing all four parts necessary to become a CPA.

To be consistent with NASBA’s annual ranking of the top 40 universities on the single-part pass rate, we list the top 40 schools for CPA success in the table for all programs with greater than 20 candidates and split by program size, medium and large.

See the complete rankings here.