The Education Pipeline

“Go to school, get good grades, get a good job, and live the American dream. Coming from Trinidad, my parents set me up on a path where these steps seemed straightforward and attainable,” says Sherry Ann Mohan, CPA, managing director at Goldman Sachs and vice chair of the NABA board of directors.

While Mohan’s immigrant parents taught her the importance of education, her college friend group introduced the idea of becoming a CPA.

“It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I had an accounting class. I always made good grades and considered law or medicine, but for me, the most important factor was being around people who had similar goals and plans,” Mohan says. “Because of them, I discovered accounting as a possible career path.”

Because of accounting’s branding problem, it often takes that firsthand perspective from a CPA or someone who knows a CPA to interest young people in pursuing the vocation and the credential.

“That’s part of the problem; people aren’t curious about accounting as a profession. You don’t see it unless somebody in your family or your friends’ family was an accountant,” Nash says. “Because of this, your idea of what accounting is may be very rudimentary in terms of what we actually do for a living. One of my personal goals is to be way more visible in places where we aren’t now so that visual is out there for the next person.”

A major part of this crusade for visibility involves introducing accounting into school curriculums much earlier. This is why NABA developed its Accounting Career Awareness Program, which Mohan says has been very effective in getting young Black students interested in the accounting field.

“The earlier you can expose students to accounting the better, because it really does help students start thinking about what’s possible. Being able to give students an understanding of what an accountant actually does opens up doors,” Mohan says.

Even incorporating Cromwell’s story into the curriculum could help show minority students there’s a place for them in the industry. As Burns laments, in his recent studies no mention was made of the journey for Black CPAs: “Not many people know about Mary T. Washington Wylie and certainly not John W. Cromwell Jr. Why is that? If we could show students earlier that there are people in the profession that look like them, it could inspire them to go farther.”

The Next 100 Years

2021 and the Black CPA centennial follow on the heels of an infamous year for Black civil rights. Moving forward, it’s important to reflect not only on how far we’ve come since Cromwell’s achievement, but on how much further we have to go to increase access to, and education about, the CPA profession.

“The killing of George Floyd has awakened the conversation around racial disparity in our country; the racial gaps in wealth, health, education, opportunity, and representation are gaping holes in the fabric of the American ideology. There are opportunities for sectors like accounting and finance and organizations like NABA to leverage platforms and narrow those gaps,” Mohan says. “Around the board table, it’s easy to see the progress we’ve made and how forward-thinking our founders’ vision was. We need to make sure we continue to move that legacy forward. Through partnership and collaboration, we continue to provide better support and understanding of the challenges that exist beyond just making sure our members do well in school or get jobs. There’s an entire framework in the industry that we strive to change.”