600 Accounting Grads a Year, 2,000 Retiring Preparers, and Nobody Talking About It
I keep coming back to a number: 600.
That is how many accounting degrees the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metro produces in a year. Across CU Denver, University of Denver, Front Range Community College, Metro State, and the Community College of Aurora combined. Six hundred.
The metro has 1.67 million workers. The average tax preparer is over 55. Industry reports — the quiet kind, not the headline kind — have firms turning away clients, raising fees, and unable to fill seasonal positions. The retirement rate in a metro this size is roughly 2,000 preparers a year. So every year the gap between who is leaving and who is arriving widens by about 1,400 people who are not showing up.
This is not subtle. It is also not a Colorado thing. It is national. But the Denver numbers make it feel less like a trend piece and more like a bathtub with the drain open.
The clients are getting harder, not easier
The demand side is moving in the wrong direction. Or the right direction, depending on whether you are the preparer or the filer.
Denver has an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 workers whose taxes are more complicated than a W-2 and a standard deduction. Construction contractors on 1099s who should be deducting materials and mileage and probably are not. Immigrant small business owners with ITINs, foreign income, and cash business reporting — 21.9% of Aurora is foreign-born and climbing. Gig workers juggling Uber, DoorDash, and a part-time remote job — three income streams, self-employment tax, quarterly estimates, and the sinking feeling that TurboTax is not handling this right. Healthcare travelers working across state lines. Crypto traders with staking rewards and wash sales they do not know how to report.
Every AI displacement story adds to this pile. The former admin assistant who is now a virtual assistant on 1099 plus some rideshare shifts. The junior accountant whose job got automated and who is now doing fractional bookkeeping through an LLC they formed in a panic. The entry-level paralegal doing contract doc review and side notary work.
Each one of these people becomes a return with two or three income sources, self-employment tax, deductions across categories, and a genuine need for someone who knows what they are doing. The simple W-2 is not the default anymore. The multi-source 1040 is.
Nobody told you the degree is optional
The thing most people get wrong about tax prep is they think it requires an accounting degree. It does not.
The IRS has a credential called Enrolled Agent. It is the highest designation the IRS awards. EAs have unlimited practice rights — same standing as a CPA or tax attorney for IRS representation. No degree. No coursework. No internship. You pass the Special Enrollment Examination, submit Form 23, clear a background check, and you are in.
Three exam parts: Individuals, Businesses, and Representation. You have three years to clear all three. The test prep is not free — Gleim charges around $639 per part for the full review system, Surgent runs about $499 — but the credential pays for itself in a season. That is not law school. It is not even a semester of community college at out-of-state rates. And unlike a degree, the credential is not diluted by more graduates, because the exam sets the bar and the bar does not move down just because the pipeline is thin.
The exam moved from Prometric to PSI Services in March 2026. That matters if you are scheduling. It does not change what is on the test.
Reddit figured this out two years ago
The career-change corners of Reddit have built a rough consensus since 2022: accounting is the number one recommended pivot for people fleeing dead-end industries.
Healthcare competes, but healthcare requires clinical rotations and anatomy prerequisites. Trades compete, but trades are physical and age-limited in ways tax prep is not.
What changed after 2022 was the collapse of the "learn to code" advice. Bootcamp placement rates cratered. One tracked cohort: 6 out of 21 graduates got software engineering jobs. That is 29%. The people posting on LinkedIn about their new roles are real. The people who took the same bootcamp and heard nothing back are also real. They just are not posting.
The post-2022 consensus is more cautious about tech and more emphatic about licensed professions. Credential moats beat generalist degrees. A CPA, an EA, a Series 7 — these are not signals of smartness. They are gates. And gates that fewer people walk through each year get more valuable, not less.
The doubt that stops people is the same thing protecting the ones who push through
Here is what the Reddit threads also surface, and what anyone who has talked to a career changer in real life already knows: most people who consider tax prep talk themselves out of it before they start.
AI headlines say the profession is doomed. Seasonal income sounds unstable. The credential ladder — PTIN, AFSP, EA — looks like work. They see risk and cost and ramp, and they conclude the play is not for them.
Every person who hesitates is one less competitor. Every year they wait is another year the existing preparers get older. The psychological barrier — call it doubt, call it fear, call it reasonable risk assessment — functions as a moat. And the moat is self-reinforcing. The longer someone waits, the closer the profession gets to the retirement cliff.
The career-change Reddit consensus is blunt in a way academic career advice rarely is: overthinking is the real enemy. Pick something. Start. Apply before you feel ready. The regret of not trying almost always outweighs the regret of failing, even for people who take pay cuts or restart entirely.
How to actually do it
Get a PTIN first. Fifteen minutes on the IRS website. It is an identifier, not a credential. It says you can prepare returns for money.
Then enroll in the Annual Filing Season Program. Eighteen hours of continuing education, including a six-hour federal tax law refresher with a test. This gets you an IRS directory listing, limited representation rights, and a real credential while you study for the EA. It also forces you to start using IRS-approved CE providers, which is the muscle you need anyway.
Then EA Part 1: Individuals. Form 1040, dependents, credits, deductions, filing status. This is the return prep you will actually do, and it overlaps most directly with the AFSP material you just covered.
Then Part 3: Representation. Circular 230, professional practice boundaries, the rules you need before you sit across from a client.
Then Part 2: Businesses, when business returns become part of your workflow.
The whole sequence can be done in a year while working. More realistically, 18 months if you are also learning software and building clients. The Denver metro is not going to suddenly produce 1,400 more accounting grads. The supply gap is structural, not a blip. If you pass the exam, you walk into a market where firms are turning away work.
If you want help structuring the study plan — which materials to use, which order to take the exams, what the high-yield topics are — I built a free EA exam coach at ea-coach.shawnli.dev. It walks you through the three SEE parts, surfaces the topics the exam actually tests, and gives you practice questions calibrated to the real thing. No upsells. Just the preparation path.