Imagine you are a student at Yeshiva University’s School of Business and have just completed accounting elective courses needed to obtain a CPA state license. Now imagine being contacted by school officials informing you those credits are, in fact, worthless. As unimaginable as it seems, this actually happened.
According to Yeshiva University’s student newspaper The Commentator, several students received an email notification from Dean Moses Pava on April 15, 2016 delivering devastating news. Apparently two accounting electives, namely “Decision Models, ACC 2160” and “Mergers: History & Practice, ACC 2401” were not in compliance with educational content regulations imposed by the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA).
In his email Pava explained, “while the Sy Syms School of Business faculty continues to believe these courses are correctly listed as accounting courses, given the course content, for the purposes of New York State these courses do not meet the requirements for the 33 credit hours in accounting.”
To qualify for CPA licensure in New York, the Office of the Professions specifies that candidates must fulfill one of the following educational pathways:
- Complete a NYS registered accounting program
- Complete an AACSB-accredited master’s degree accounting program
OR
- Complete a regionally accredited bachelor’s degree program that contains at least 150 semester hours of pre-selected topics in accounting education
Students that opted for the third education pathway were required to complete 33 of the 150 required semester hours by taking a course in each of the following career-related topics:
- Financial accounting and reporting
- Accounting information systems
- Cost/managerial accounting
- Internal controls and risk assessment
- Auditing and attestation services
- Fraud examination
- Taxation
The school’s failure to adhere to the abovementioned “33 credit” guidelines is what ultimately delayed the careers of several Sy Syms students. And although Pava offered students three different online and onsite course options to reclaim their forfeited credits, it comes as little compensation for those already invested in job offers and CPA license examination preparations.
