By January 1999 there were almost that many in the business school alone, which now has 52 candidates, while campuswide, the number had grown to more than 100 students. The dual-degree initiative has spread to serve disciplines that will benefit future scientists, accountants, economists, engineers and others. Within the College of Arts and Sciences, concurrent degrees have been approved for East Asian languages and civilizations, economics, EPO biology, Germanic and Slavic languages, and psychology. A Colorado law that will become effective within a few years will require 150 credit hours for a CPA candidate, and the CU-Boulder program already meets that requirement. The current enrollment is nearly double the number of accounting and business students involved with the dual degree program last year.
Programs are under consideration for several other schools.
The unique degree track, however, is not an easy road to success. There is a big difference between graduate classes and undergraduate classes. Lynch agreed that the academic load can be a challenge when a student's junior year might suddenly include a course from the graduate school. The students are exposed to the top-level courses, and that can be more intense for them. The concurrent degree initiative, however, allows students to get a fairly thorough grounding in their studies and be exposed to real-world expectations in pressure and promise.