Accounting is of the hottest bachelor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #8 most popular major in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 42 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for accounting students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 2,409 bachelor's degrees in accounting to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Accounting School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The accounting bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality accounting program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on accounting students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other accounting students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How easy is it for accounting to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized accounting related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for accounting students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Accounting Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Villanova University is a great choice for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in accounting. Villanova is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Villanova.
Those accounting students who get their bachelor's degree from Villanova University earn $20,767 more than the standard accounting student.
Lehigh University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. Lehigh is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the city of Bethlehem.
Those accounting students who get their bachelor's degree from Lehigh University make $19,827 more than the standard accounting graduate.
Drexel University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. Drexel is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Philadelphia.
Accounting bachelor's degree recipients from Drexel University receive an earnings boost of around $12,870 over the typical income of accounting majors.
Located in the city of Philadelphia, St. Joe's is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the accounting major at Saint Joseph's University earn $12,608 more than the standard college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
Located in the city of Scranton, University of Scranton is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the accounting degree program at University of Scranton earn $13,254 above the average college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
Bucknell is a small private not-for-profit university located in the distant town of Lewisburg.
Bachelor's recipients from the accounting major at Bucknell University earn $18,577 above the average college grad in this field when they enter the workforce.
Located in the city of Allentown, Muhlenberg is a private not-for-profit college with a small student population.
Accounting bachelor's degree recipients from Muhlenberg College get an earnings boost of approximately $11,653 above the average earnings of accounting majors.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).