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KPMG offers an accounting degree program for British high school grads

Stephen Beard Jan 14, 2011
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KPMG offers an accounting degree program for British high school grads

Stephen Beard Jan 14, 2011
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STEVE CHIOTAKIS: Here’s an offer many British high school graduates may find hard to refuse. A major employer there is offering to pay college tuition for up to hundred students. And put them on an annual salary, too. Here’s the catch: the degree program is in accounting.

Marketplace’s Stephen Beard reports from London.


STEPHEN BEARD: The accounting giant KPMG has launched the scheme in a bid to make accounting more sexy. On the face of it, it should succeed. The firm will not only pick up the tab for the students’ tuition and accommodation costs; it will pay them a salary of $30,000 a year, too. There is a downside. Successful applicants won’t spend much of their time chilling out in the student union. For the first three years of the course they will work around nine months of the year at KPMG offices, under strict supervision. But says economist Andrew Hilton, accounting can be the gateway to a glittering career in business.

ANDREW HILTON: Boring and dreadful tho’ it is for the first twenty years, you emerge at the end as the CEO of a major corporation with huge bonuses, a vast salary and a second or third house in the sun.

KPMG admits that it launched its scheme because of trouble recruiting and retaining staff.

In London this is Stephen Beard for Marketplace.

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