Ernst & Young which always recruicted heavily on my campus did not even give any interviews for Audit and Tax positions. I was told they have already met their quotas. I've also head the bad news from other accounting firms, scaling back and even cancelling positions that were offered.

I also noticed that Deloitte really scaled back on how many people they interviewed and did not even extend any interviews for tax on my campus.

Accounting is not anymore the profession where its easy to find jobs. It will only get worse. Everybody and their mother, from every corner of the world is trying to get employment in America as an accountant, top that off with the fact that Accounting is now the "IN" college major in America,its going to get even more competitive. Couple that with the fact that finance is now dead. 

I've been noticing and talking about this trend, I've  seen how students think Accounting is the new "stock broker job", many of these "frat" boy types who should be in marketing are choosing accounting. I've noticed that many foriegn countries are educating their students to specifically come to America for accounting jobs. I've also seen how Accounting has exploded in my university and how every year is a new high in the amount of accounting graduates in the country, with probably no end in sight.

Personally, I made a big mistake by choosing accounting. This is my opinion however. Its ultra competitive, requires no creativity or ingenuity, you are competiting with people based on how cool you are, who you know, how good looking you are, and with every attrative women. Not with your quality of work or how well you may be able to help the clients. Its business after all, they need salesmen to sell their *removed*ty non-audit services.

Some years back I was going to make a career change into Nano-technology, and boy did I make a mistake not following through. I could now be on the forefront of science, inventing the future, working on interesting projects with a cause and purpose, and work that benifits people and people appreciate. I would be competing with people based on what I know and what I have done, not based on personality or how good looking you are.

Why have I choosen accounting? Because I honestly wanted to be a "big time stock broker" and thought it would be better getting a CPA to find a job in this area. The problem today is that the "big time stock broker" profession is pretty much non-existant when it all went electronic.

Well.... this is more or less a rant, and most of it is my opinion, if you have a different opinion please post it. My recomendation to people going into accounting is to look at other options, and I tell this to people all the time. I've worked in public accounting for 5 months in the past and it was the most boring-pathetic work I've done. If you can work in other areas, especially engineering or similar industries, you should consider looking elsewhere.

Eddie, first of all you should be grateful you're not graduating in finance right now. Compared to accounting firms cutting their recruiting somewhat (take into account, they're also overstaffed, well, a lot of them are), finance jobs, at least big investment banker fancy schmancy ones are just GONE at this point. What if you were graduating from a top MBA in finance with 100K in debt? Now, that would be a reason to rant.

Second thing is, you overestimate the number of foreigners looking for accounting jobs in the US. Most accounting firms right now don't offer work visas at all for foreign students. if nothing else jobs are being shipped to foreign countries,esp. India and China. And yes, tax is somewhat affected but a lot of these are bookeeping types of jobs too.

Third, on being liked and having to kiss ass. Sorry to disappoint, but this is true about most other fields out there. And the higher up you are, the more important it gets. I know some engineers who work in counsulting,for them, it's the same kind of story. I think some of it is also American culture, being likable and being able to make small talk is everything!I hate it, but I manage, and so can you, I'm sure.

How big is your school, Eddie? How many firms come to your campus to recruit? How big are the offices in the area? These all could be the reasons why you're having hard time finding a job. I went to a small college myself, only about 15-20% of people there had jobs upon graduation. I decided to go to a bigger and heavily recruited college for my Master's and now I have a couple of job offers.And I know E&Y was recruiting this year, maybe not hiring as many, but they were hiring for sure.