NABA teams with CAQ to support HBCUs

The National Association of Black Accountants is partnering with the Center for Audit Quality to help community-college students successfully make the transition to historically Black colleges and universities. 

The work of the partnership will be managed by NABA Inc., helped by a $1 million grant from the CAQ over five years. The CAQ investment will connect students with mentors and tutors to help students progress from two-year to four-year accounting programs.

“HBCUs make up approximately 3% of the institutions of higher education in the United States, yet they graduate nearly 20% of Black professionals,” said NABA CEO and president Guylaine Saint Juste in a statement Thursday. “NABA’s current work to build educational pathways that assist Black students in transitioning from high school and community college to HBCUs through articulated agreements is a critical component of building diverse and robust accounting, business and financial talent pipelines. Our partnership with CAQ better positions us to engage and provide students with wrap around support services that ensure their journey to higher ed is both manageable and successful at scale.”

CAQ’S recent pipeline research indicates that while Black and African American community college students are most open to accounting, these numbers drop dramatically when it comes to selecting an accounting degree over other areas of business.

“While public company audit firms have made progress with regards to diversity, we can and must do more to diversify the talent pipeline,” said CAQ CEO Julie Bell Lindsay in a statement. “We need to better understand what is driving the fall-off between openness to accounting and ultimately not pursuing the degree, especially for Black community college students who, in our research, showed the highest level of interest. We believe there is tremendous opportunity to do more to engage these students. Through this collaboration with NABA, we aim to address current barriers to entry that Black students face when exploring a career in accounting, and to increase the number of Black CPAs within the public company audit profession.”

As part of the partnership, NABA will get access to resources from Accounting+,  a multiyear initiative to increase the profession’s diverse talent pipeline and bring awareness to the profession’s progress on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

CAQ member firms Deloitte and CliftonLarsonAllen are also supporters of the NABA program.

Courtesy of the Center for Audit Quality