Majored in Accounting?

According to CNN news, the highest paid degree for these couple of years is accounting major. Besides that, graduates with a bachelor’s in accounting are also the top one demanded. I’m thinking that if we could use the market model to explain this fact. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed by government to “strengthen corporate governance and restore investor confidence in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals involving prominent companies in the US”, which made companies in dire need of more accountants and auditors. From then on, accounting major became more popular, the demand curve significantly shift to the right. As a result, salary would rise up, same as we find in the market model, when demand curve shift right, price goes up, and the causation of it was the government law.

There is another interesting fact in the report of “Most lucrative college degrees”. We see that civil engineering jumped 5.1% to an average salary at $43,159, but accounting only rose 2.4%. From my point of view, since the market always move towards equilibrium, the “supply” of accountants might have grown, which means the supply curve shifted a little bit to the right for these recent years. This leads to a result, the price would fall. However, since the SOX law still has a strong influence in business field now, graduates with accounting major are still highly demanded, and the salary would still be the top one these years (although business administration seems catching up, I guess there won’t be any shifter could lead it with a huge growth); the market is now moving towards its “clearing price”, by which time demand and supply are equal.

So what’s your opinion on the reports?