EW professions have taken as much of a beating in as short a time as accounting has in the last two years.

The low point might have come in 2002, when David B. Duncan, an accountant at Arthur Andersen who worked on the firm's audits of Enron, pleaded guilty on April 9 to obstruction of justice for ordering the destruction of documents related to work for Enron. Andersen, which two years ago was one of the five biggest accounting firms in the world, has disintegrated.

Some accountants worried that as the scandals unfolded, one after the other, the profession would not recover its luster, attract young people or keep the nonaudit business that lawyers, bankers and other professionals would love to steal.

"We were all trying to figure out what to do," said Jeffrey R. Hoops, the president of the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants and a partner at Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four surviving firms. "People within the profession were extremely concerned about what the fallout from that would be."

But things have worked out differently, Mr. Hoops said. "If there's a silver lining in some of these scandals, it's that there is more appreciation for what it is accountants do."

Bea Sanders, the director for academic and career development at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, an industry group in New York, said she had found a similar effect. "The publicity of the last couple of years has really helped, ironically," she said.

Accounting firms are hiring. In the wake of accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom (now MCI) and others, the audit committees of corporate boards are demanding more from their auditors. "I have one client where the audit committee used to meet once a year, maybe twice," Mr. Hoops said. "Now they meet at least quarterly, in person — more often by telephone if needed."

Legislation passed last year, intended to prevent other scandals, also imposes new duties on auditors. In the midst of this, accountants are raising their fees.

The scandals and greater scrutiny have not scared off Stanley Lu, 21, who plans to take the certified public accounting exam next year after finishing his undergraduate program at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. "If anything, it's a little more exciting and has me more interested," he said.

Mr. Lu is not alone. Michael T. Dance, a former auditor at KPMG who now teaches at Haas, said that his auditing class had increased sharply in popularity since he arrived two years ago, rising to nearly 50 students (and more on a waiting list) from 30 in 2001.

"Three years ago, the business students wanted to go into banking, consulting, and those industries aren't hiring right now," he said. So students are "looking at accounting as an alternative, which is great for the profession because the profession needs to attract the best and the brightest."

In addition, three of the Big Four firms have spun off their consulting operations, meaning that the accountants who remain in the accounting firms will be running the show, said Roman L. Weil, a professor of accounting at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Accountants will find the prospect of not having to compete with consultants for prestige and business attractive, he said.

"The bright, innovative people tended to go over to that side," Mr. Weil said. In 1995 at a big firm, he said, "If you were an accountant, you were second banana."

The legislation passed last year also prohibits accounting firms from providing several types of consulting services, including the highly profitable technology consulting work, to companies that they also audit. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG have all separated from their consulting units; Deloitte & Touche announced a plan to do so but has since said it will not.

Overall, fewer than half, 39 percent, of the C.P.A.'s who belong to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants work for accounting firms. About 47 percent work in corporate controllers' offices, treasury and accounting departments and offices that may have little to do with accounting directly. Within companies, the accountant's path to the executive office has changed over the last decade, Mr. Weil said.

In the past, most accountants who rose to chief financial officer came through the corporate controller's offices, where they helped keep the books and did other tasks that people traditionally thought of as accounting, he said. But in the last 10 years, more C.P.A.'s have risen through corporate treasury offices, dealing with mergers and acquisitions, analysts, Wall Street firms and investors.

"That has been the glamour job, and it's where the big bucks have been," Mr. Weil said. As a result, he said, "The tippy-top people interested in finance have taken the treasury, M. and A., investment banker jobs, not controller."

For years, accountants have been trying to attract more young people, ever since a survey in 2000 by the accountants' institute found that interest in the profession was plummeting among high school and college students. The institute hired a marketing company to help inform young people about the opportunities the profession could offer.

The campaign kicked off on Dec. 3, 2001 — the day after Enron filed for bankruptcy protection.

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