Somehow "GIGO, the web LOLZ" *shrug* is worse than "yeah the software hallucinated we're going to work on improved guardrails to prevent it"

If you want to be in corporate accounting or finance, I would recommend just not aiming for a CPA license at all. Do your four year degree and get a job. The CPA license helps to get a job, as does the extra year of school, but most companies chalk it up as worth two years experience (the masters is one and the license is one) in any case.

Under no circumstances should they go into public accounting, and my experience in corporate hasn't been great either. Finance/accounting is a frequent target of cost cutting, reorganization, and outsourcing.

Making the requirements tougher was a way to reduce the number of CPAs originally. It wasn't to enhance the professional characteristics of the industry.

The fact is, 4 year degree or 5 years of credits, a significant portion of grads don't have the capacity to pass the exam, but give them four years in industry and suddenly they have no trouble passing most sections (bar the tax section). In most cases the 150 hours don't even have to be in accounting. For instance in Massachusetts "A CPA candidate must complete 150 credit hours (225 quarter hours) of college or university education for a Bachelor’s degree from a nationally or regionally accredited institution. Credits can be earned outside of a degree program and community college credits are accepted without transfer into a four-year school."

The point of making it harder to get licensed was to reduce the number of CPAs, which should have driven up the salaries of CPAs. Instead, the big auditing firms got bigger and fewer, keeping entry salaries low and churning grads. Auditing is a terrible industry to be in unless you're a director, and even a lot of the directors are in hock to their firms (because they borrow from the firm to buy in). My partner and I are both CPAs, and we want nothing more than for our child to find a different career in life.