<p>graduate school bound econ major here:</p>
<p>there is a rumor in the department that it will altogether switch to Liberal Arts (presumably there would still be BS in the business college, of course). This reflects the pretty widespread belief that the econ department doesn’t really belong in the college of business, most likely because a business econ degree is the worse of the two the registrar defines as ‘economics’. There’s also a large food and resource economics department that I believe is much larger than the business econ department that isn’t grouped with the general BA in Economics. Economics is primarily a social science, and is only really useful within the scope of the business college if you’re trying to do something that you would normally do with another business degree–which is to say that if you want to do something in finance, accounting, or marketing (the three most similar majors), you’re better off majoring in one of those three options. The BS in Econ from the business school is really only the best option when you aren’t sure what you want to do, or know you want to have a career in finance or marketing, but are just really interested in economics. there are also a few more development programs in the business college, but they’re not that big of a deal.</p>
<p>Why you should join economics in CLAS: its much easier to double major in math. if you want to go to graduate school in economics, you MUST take a lot of math. the plan should be a double major in math, but what classes you’ve taken is much more important than having the paper. even if you don’t end up going to graduate school, a degree with upper level mathematics is more useful and versatile than the equivalent business degree without upper level math.
Another plus for the BA econ is the lack of rigidity with schedule; you can pretty much take whatever class you want whenever you want to, and aside from the gen ed classes, you dont have to take any non-econ classes that you dont want to take.</p>
<p>long story short, the vast majority of econ majors belong in CLAS, in my opinion.</p>
<p>as for our econ program in general: we have great professors, but its a small program whose biggest priority, by far, is research. this means that if you want to do some research yourself or help someone as a research assistant, there are a lot of options. the downside being that a lot of people want to be put in that position, and with a faculty of maybe 15 faculty members, its sort of competitive. note that i said we only had about 15 faculty members. thats small. but they get paid well. they’re also generally pretty old, which is sort of unusual. schools like USF and UCF have pretty young, sort of non-traditional professors. By that i dont mean unothodox, but UCF’s PhD program, for instance, focuses on environmental policy, and USF’s department, from what i can tell, is very much influenced by foreign perspectives. our department is primarily old close-to-retirement white ivy-graduates who teach a more intensive, traditional program. i don’t know if any of that is actually relevant, but thats the knowledge i’ve gathered through talking with undergraduates in those departments. i do know that at USF you end up taking 3 levels of micro and macro, while we cover those 3 semesters in 2 semesters here.</p>
<p>the most relevant to OP: placement. to my knowledge, we have NEVER placed a student into a ‘tier 1’ graduate program. the highest ranked school i know we’ve placed into is Northwestern, which is ranked around 11 and is a ‘tier 2’ program. consider this: one of our students was trying to get into MIT a year or two ago, and a member of our department was told that only about 1 or 2 americans would get into their class of 50. nationally, our department is ranked about 50, and from all i’ve heard, most top 10 schools wont even consider your application just because of where you come from, with the exception of chicago just because they’re a somewhat unique school, especially among the top tier of economics departments. its not all bad, however. you should always aim for the highest ranked school you can get into, but any school down to our own 50th ranked selves is good enough to get in as a research professor somewhere. as rush put it when i spoke to him, you generally go to school one place, and can find a job at a school ranked about 20-30 spots lower than that school once you graduate. the only real implications of this are that you shouldn’t expect to be the next treasury secretary or celebrity economist, if only because you’re coming from UF (as if those are realistic expectations from someone who already goes to one of those schools).</p>
<p>and as a disclaimer, very little of what i’ve said is fact. only my impressions and opinions, and should not be taken as being definitive in any way. general advisers should have this disclaimer as well, however.</p>