Georgetown University McDonough School of Business undergraduate accounting students reap higher starting salaries entering the workforce than accounting students at any other college or university in the United States, according to a study published by a business software research firm.

The study, published by Best Accounting Software Sept. 1, found median earnings for MSB accounting graduates amount to $83,100 per year, $17,800 more than the median at  second-ranked Santa Clara University in California. In addition to median earnings, the rankings also looked at graduation rate, total debt, monthly loan repayments and the comparison between the median earnings and the state or province’s average salary for all graduates.

The program owes its success to the hard work of both students and faculty, according to professor William R. Baber, the Accounting Area coordinator in charge of recruiting faculty to the accounting program and communicating with deans who oversee the different areas of the MSB.

“We have students that have strong people skills, and if we can properly develop the intellectual piece of the accounting curriculum, then they become problem solvers in addition to having the ability to communicate,” Baber said in an interview with The Hoya. “I’d like to see the faculty take credit for all of it, but I think that when you have such wonderful students coming into the program, we work hard not to undo that talent.”

The accounting major at Georgetown predates even the McDonough School of Business. The school’s predecessor, the Division of Business and Public Administration, which was founded in 1936, administered the major first. 

The program aims to give its graduates a diverse skill set to prepare them for a variety of jobs. The wide range of fields graduates enter may contribute to their higher starting salaries, according to Baber.

“We place people not in just traditional accounting jobs; we place about a third of our graduates with financial services, Wall Street jobs, another third go into consulting and the final third go into public accounting, which is the traditional model for accounting jobs,” Baber said.

Double majoring might also augment graduates’ earnings, according to accounting professor Kirsten Anderson. 

“When they double major in accounting and finance, and then they choose the Wall Street role, that’s going to pull up starting salaries a bit,” Anderson said in an interview with The Hoya. “But if you compare us to what I’d call our ‘peer group,’ like Notre Dame for instance has a similar setup and similar type of student generally, they don’t seem to have the same flexibility, and their students don’t seem to have the same opportunities we have.”

An analysis of the study done by Poets & Quants, a media organization that ranks both graduate and undergraduate business schools throughout the world, suggests the rankings may have been biased by geographic location, as wages in certain cities would be higher than other regions with a lower cost of living. 

Most Georgetown accounting graduates find work in New York, followed by Washington, D.C. and then California, according to Anderson. New York, D.C. and California have among the highest costs of living in the United States.

Regardless of the various explanations for the ranking, the accounting faculty places emphasis on career development and exploration beyond what the Cawley Career Education Center offers, according to Anderson. She also serves on a committee that is currently working to update and improve the accounting curriculum.

“Specifically, the things we’re looking at adding are a little more the technical aspect of it, so requiring a tech-based class,” she said. “And then we are always eyeing flexibility, so offering more electives, et cetera.”

The accounting program’s ranking reflects not only current but continued success of students with MSB accounting degrees, according to Baber.

“There is a long tradition of accounting scholarship at Georgetown,” Baber said. “A nontrivial number of our successful alums were accounting majors. That in itself would attract a lot of people to the accounting programs at Georgetown.”