Balancing the Books

During the rest of the call, Sharp laid out a plan to meaningfully recruit and retain Black accounting students at Texas A&M. It would be ambitious, requiring serious buy-in from partners like PwC. That plan was the Black Accounting Student Success (BASS) Initiative and, if successful, it would create life-changing opportunities for students and produce generational ripple effects on the department’s demographics.

Former student and PwC partner Sammy Miller ’00 was one of the firm’s representatives on the call that day. As a Black Mays graduate, Miller felt Sharp’s words hit him square in the chest. “Everything you just said was music to my ears,” he replied, emotion creeping into his voice. He, too, was ready to “put boots on the ground” and make a serious commitment to helping Black Aggies excel in accounting. After all, he never knew what kind of life he could make in the field until others showed him the way.

Learning to Love Accounting

In the sleepy town of Sealy, Texas, about an hour’s drive west from Houston, Miller grew up dreaming of working toward a better life. Those around him pushed him to become a doctor, but after attending a camp for high school pre-med students held on Texas A&M’s campus, he realized it was not the path for him. By the time he received his acceptance letter from Texas A&M and learned he would be the first in his family to earn a college degree, he still didn’t know what he would study.
 

Taking stock of his skills, he eventually connected his knack for numbers with a career in money management, but not as an accountant. After all, he was young and yearning for the fast life, and Hollywood taught him to find it on Wall Street. “I watched ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ and ‘Pretty Woman’ and saw these finance guys driving sports cars,” he said. “Every time I saw an accountant in a movie, they wore a pocket protector and a weird-looking visor hat.” Thus, he majored in finance.

One day, an upperclassman returning from an internship with PwC encouraged Miller to intern with the firm as well. “I had no idea what PwC was,” Miller said. “But I applied and got accepted into the internship program, and I loved it.” He continued working for PwC after receiving his bachelor’s degree in finance and earning a master’s degree at the University of Houston. “At some point, I transferred from tax accounting to audit, and I loved it. Now, how does someone love audit? I don’t know, but I did.”

Miller’s passion for diving deep into and fine-tuning his clients’ businesses made for a world-spanning career, taking him to places like Dubai, Norway and South Africa. Looking back, he credits one student organization for inspiring him to start his journey: the Texas A&M chapter of the National Association of Black Accountants (NABA). “The upperclassman who told me about the internship opportunity at PwC was in NABA,” Miller said. “Without her and NABA, I probably wouldn’t have applied.”

A Shot at the Top

The university’s NABA chapter had been inactive for two years when Sharp took over as department head in fall 2020. Recognizing the organization’s ability to provide students with a sense of belonging, academic support and professional development, he prioritized getting NABA up and running. Revitalizing NABA was just one component of a greater effort to foster a more diverse department, with emphasis on recruiting and retaining Black students, who make up a disproportionately low number compared to state demographics.
 

To Sharp, increasing Black representation on campus is integral to Texas A&M’s land-grant mission. “If we exist to serve the people of Texas, our numbers should not be wildly different from the state’s,” he said. In addition to the general benefits of fostering a diverse student body—surrounding all students with different perspectives and preparing them for a diverse workforce—Sharp believes the field of accounting can provide Black Aggies with unique career opportunities, but only if they are aware of them.

“What I love about accounting is that it’s a relatively level playing field,” Sharp explained. “You don’t have to have a father who went to an Ivy League school or some other family connection to the industry. If you work hard and you’re honest, you can start as an entry-level employee at one of the Big Four firms and you can succeed. Everyone has a shot at making it to the top. That’s the pitch every incoming freshman needs to hear.”
 

Many of PwC’s most impactful gifts for the university have come directly from former students wanting to make a difference. Utilizing the firm’s gift matching program, partner Kyle Liner ’01 and his wife, Meredith ’01, funded a $25,000 scholarship through the Texas A&M Foundation with preference for students working a part-time job during their studies.

“That was important to us based on our own experiences because we both worked throughout school,” Liner said. Impassioned to maximize his impact, he and Miller also coordinated a joint gift between them, PwC and other partners to establish a Foundation Excellence Award (FEA) scholarship through the Foundation. The FEA historically supports underserved students at Texas A&M.

PwC partner Kevin Heard ’93 similarly took advantage of matching funds from his firm to establish his own $100,000 endowed FEA scholarship through the Foundation. Hailing from humble beginnings and having worked his way through college to pay for tuition, Heard sympathizes strongly with first-generation and disenfranchised Aggies. “I feel like I can help students who need assistance get to a better place,” he said. While his individual scholarship held personal significance, he was also proud to work together with Liner, Sharp, Miller and other former students at PwC on promoting Sharp’s big-picture, needle-moving scholarship program, the BASS Initiative.

Leaders In the Long Run

The BASS Initiative’s primary goal is simple: Establish 20 endowed, full-ride FEA scholarships to high-performing Black students to study accounting at Mays Business School as well as a learning community built in conjunction with the rebooted NABA chapter. At $300,000 per endowed scholarship and $2 million to endow the proposed learning community, the initiative is no leisurely affair. But Sharp argues that the asking price represents the department’s dedication to recruiting and retaining Black students. “We need to approach things differently than we’ve done in the past,” he stated. “We have to go big on this if we want to improve.”