While I'm taking the LSATs in October, I'm also enrolled in a post BA accounting program.
The reason I hear though that a lot of people want to try law school instead is that the schooling is a lot more interesting, finance especially accounting can be extremely square. Law school seems more fun, most of the Finance students I know sit in front of their Thinkpads all day staring at Excel sheets in the library, and punching their textbooks out of frustration from their exam the next morning.
Also, I've heard in the US the CPA final exam has a higher failure rate on first try than the BAR. I'm not sure how accurate that is nation wide, but I did a quick Google search and it definitely looks like it most States, a lot more people flunk the CPA exam at a higher rate than the BAR. I've looked through my friend's school books for law (they're lawyers), most of it is a lot less complex than stuff like bond rates that Finance people have to deal with.
The benefit of being an Accountant is that the job is basically recession proof, due to dynamics of corporate structure. I know a lot of Canadian accountants that are ridiculously well-paid, and not that hardworking.
It's better than Engineering too if you're strictly after money. But again, the material taught in the beginning of Accounting can be very square just as some Engineering courses are. Accountants I know describe it as excruciatingly square. The work itself of being an auditor isn't that exciting. The happiest Accountants I know do things such as others start businesses, or are execs at big companies, they're not public accountants. The earning potential in Finance is huge. The most interesting part is, you can always work for an MNC, and work all over the world.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/04/silico ... -facebook/
To people who live outside the Valley, these accounts of unbounded compensation paint a picture of a place overflowing in bullion. And in some parts, that’s kind of true: Go to Atherton or Old Palo Alto and you see enormous, multi-million-dollar mansions that rival the best that Beverly Hills has to offer.
But those properties belong to executives and finance guys. The hard-toiling coders, meanwhile, live more modestly. I’ve spoken to many engineers at the Valley’s biggest companies, and from what I can tell, their salaries range from $100,000 to $150,000.