From this week Chicago Maroon(1/26/18):
“Posters urging College Council members to vote against a business major appeared around campus this week. Reached by phone, College Council spokesperson Greg Engel said he had to keep the proceedings of the Council confidential. He confirmed that the Council would be the body with jurisdiction over the creation of a new major, and he said he welcomes student input on any controversy.”
Yeah - possible explanations:
Didn’t we already have a thread on this? http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/2038391-business-economics-major-p1.html The cat got out of the bag because of some papers that were picked out of a trash can and sent to the Maroon, or something like that.
It’s a credible proposal, it probably is on the College Council agenda, and it’s no surprise that it’s controversial with Chicago students. As described in the foregoing thread, it’s not quite the Apocalypse, yet. But that’s a little like saying Frodo shouldn’t have worried when one or two Black Riders showed up in the Shire, because that wasn’t all nine of them.
Chicago doesn’t need to be the answer to the question “What would Wharton be like if everyone had to take a Hum?”
Not sure that the trash-can papers are the correct source, @JHS. That thread you posted came from the proverbial grapevine.
delete
Sell.
The latest update on the Business ECONOMICS Major (but not the Bunsens Major) :
“In the Name of Critical Thinking Skills, Tell Factulty(sp) Council to Vote NO”
Um, how about telling Faculty Council to vote YES - on whether to introduce more Writing and Spelling courses.
The two most powerful faculty in the university proposes something… it will happen. There is a chance that it will be overridden this year if these idiots have their way, but it will happen.
That article did make me think about one thing: As of the end of the last quarter, 25% of students with a declared major were majoring in economics. That’s just wild. The second most popular major, Math, is not quite 10% of those students. (There’s almost certainly a large overlap between Econ and Math, each being a popular second major for the other.)
Anyway, it must be something of a pain for students who are into economics as an academic discipline to put up with the wannabe investment bankers, and vice versa. I’ll bet there is some conflict in the classrooms. Maybe some of the faculty resent having to supervise honors theses for kids not actually interested in economics, if that happens. Building the wannabes their own major could be a way of dealing with that, and freeing the “real” economics people of the burden of processing wannabes through the system.
Unless, that is, they can figure out how not to admit those hundreds of wannabes in the first place.
The big question is, how many of those ~400 students per class are going to opt for Business Economics vs. Economics, the academic discipline?
@marlowe1 : These are some of the Aristotle-loving, anti-prestige, pure scholars you think are being admitted?
In the 1980’s when I was at GSB, the Economics faculty there was perceived as the junior varsity to the big boys at Department of Economics (Fame and Miller being the exception of course as they were giants in their own field then) . I suspect the ranking order somehow persists through the years up to now as I have seen many faculty members moving from Dept. of Economics to GSB/Booth but seldom the other way around. Ironically, out of the last 3 Nobel Economics Laureates from U of C, two of them are actually from the Business School side (Fama and Thaler).
This is my slightly evil interpretation of a Business Economics major at The College. As @JHS points out above, not all 400 of the Economics majors all aspire to enroll at PhD program upon graduation. A fair amount of them just want to be investment bankers, hedge fund managers or any finance jobs. The high priests of Price Theory and Quantitative Models would rather not deal with them. So why not create a Business Economics major and offload the teaching to the JV guys at Booth? It is for sure a pareto-optimal solution: Dept. of Economics gets to focus on nurturing the next generation of Chicago School economists; Booth Economics professors get to educate the next round of Goldman analysts or Citadel junior traders; and both the academic and pre-professional students will self select to their own classes where they find useful content for their next level of career pursuit. Everyone is happy 
@JHS I don’t approve! Pleased to be singing from the same hymnal with you, brother.
Wasn’t Econ always a popular major, even when the entire College was barely larger than the (current) first year class? There may be a greater number of Wall Street wannabes now vs then, but the proportion probably hasn’t changed all that much. BTW most Econ majors - at UChicago or anywhere else - never went near a PhD program.
There might be another reason for Bus. Econ, boys. And that’s to encourage more girls. Especially if this program is more quantitative and less theoretical.
The farthest back you can get comparable declared major numbers is 2004-2005. About 21% of students who had declared a major were doing an economics major. So the percentage has gone up, but not that much.
However, with the size of the College increasing and the number of undeclared upperclasspeople shriveling, the absolute number of majors has more than doubled. Does anyone think the size of the Economics faculty has doubled in the past 12 years?
There is no doubt that it would help the undergrad. program if some of the Booth faculty stepped in.
@JHS not sure who’s even teaching over there anymore. Much of the permanent tenured faculty didn’t teach undergrad when I roamed those hallowed halls. Maybe it’s different now.
Are you talking about permanent, tenured GSB faculty, or permanent, tenured Social Science Division faculty? If the latter, that’s sort of scandalous.
^^The latter. Permanent GSB faculty historically haven’t taught undergrads either, but as Booth didn’t have an undergrad. program that’s not so scandalous 
Hanson, Heckman, Telser, Rosen, Scheinkman, Stigler, Grossman - I’d put NONE of those guys in front of undergrads. The College was small enough as it was. Highly doubt the macro guys would have taught from Robert Barro’s “Macroeconomics” LOL. The Nobels-in-Waiting probably restricted their teaching to grad students. Maybe some of the new guys would teach. Really don’t know. And the department has changed a bit from 30 years ago - it appears bigger, for one thing. Unlike other social sciences, economics departments tended not to have a plethora of faculty on hand to run multiple undergraduate seminars - outsourcing to permanent, non-tenure-track instructors or grad students was always relatively common. YMMV - LAC’s, for instance, will vary from research uni’s on this issue and private uni’s might differ from publics. One can easily go through the College undergrad courses for Winter quarter to see how many tenured faculty members are listed as the instructor.
Just checked what Ed Prescott was teaching over at ASU as I recall someone on the National Merit threads a couple years ago saying how great it was that undergrads can take econ. courses from a Nobel Laureate at ASU. It’s true: he does teach one undergrad. course once a year, in the spring - Advanced Honors Macro. So you have to be in business at Barrett Honors College and pretty far along in your major to get him but that makes sense since he teaches pretty high-brow stuff.
Funny you say that, as these high priests are often hired as consultants for these very same companies.
@hebegebe In my days professors like Lucas, Hansen, Rosen and Becker from the Dept. of Economics did not do consultation work at Wall Street firms. Business School professors of course frequently had and still have close connection with the industry. But Economics professors then stayed in the academia. I am just curious who among current faculty members would be consultant to hedge fund or i-banks. List? Levitt? Hard to imagine Goldman or Bridgewater will hire Lucas or Heckman. This does not mean Lucas or Heckman are not smart. Indeed I have highest regards for those two. But their works are not exactly what Wall Street is looking for.
Sandy Grossman went to Wall St. didn’t he? And Scheinkman as well?
Edit: these guys might be back in academia again.