If you pursue a bachelor's degree in accounting, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #8 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 19 schools in North Carolina to determine which ones were the best for accounting students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 890 bachelor's degrees in accounting during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account 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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 full 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 picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Accounting Bachelor's Degree Schools in North Carolina ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Wake Forest University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. Located in the city of Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University is a private not-for-profit university with a medium-sized student population.More information about a bachelor’s in accounting from Wake Forest University
Elon University is a good option for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in accounting. Elon is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit university located in the medium-sized suburb of Elon.
Those accounting students who get their bachelor's degree from Elon University make $20,530 more than the standard accounting student.
It's difficult to beat North Carolina State University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in accounting. Located in the large city of Raleigh, NC State is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the accounting degree program at North Carolina State University get $7,372 above the average graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Appalachian State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. Appalachian State is a fairly large public university located in the town of Boone.
Bachelor's recipients from the accounting major at Appalachian State University make $6,437 more than the typical college graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
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).