Fordham vs. University of Maryland for accounting: which is better for career preparation?

For accounting career preparation, University of Maryland usually has the edge for breadth of recruiting and overall business-school infrastructure, while Fordham stands out if you specifically want to build your path in New York City and take advantage of semester-time internship access. Maryland’s Smith School is especially well known with large employer pipelines, and Fordham’s biggest practical advantage is proximity to Manhattan firms through the Gabelli School of Business.

A student who wants a more traditional business-school environment with deep campus recruiting, lots of employer visibility, and a strong alumni network across the Mid-Atlantic will often find Maryland easier to leverage. Smith has a strong reputation with accounting firms and large companies, and the scale of the business school tends to create more structured recruiting opportunities, student organizations, and career programming. If you want the kind of setup where internships, employer events, and accounting-specific recruiting are very built out on campus, Maryland is hard to overlook.

Fordham makes the most sense for someone who wants to use location as part of their training. Being in New York can matter a lot in accounting because it can make networking, informational meetings, and even in-semester internships more feasible. Gabelli is respected, and students who are proactive can turn the city into a real advantage, especially if they are targeting public accounting, corporate accounting, or finance-adjacent roles in NYC. The tradeoff is that Fordham often rewards self-starters who will actively seek out those opportunities rather than waiting for a campus process to carry them.