Anyone know of schools with good economics programs with good job placement stats? Preferably in the southeast or southwest?
These analyses may help you create a list of schools to research further:
If your qualifications are strong enough, and you can afford the costs, you might want to check out:
Davidson
Duke
Georgetown
Johns Hopkins
Rice
UMCP
UVa
Vanderbilt
William & Mary
These schools (all located in the south, more or less) feature some combination of high overall USNWR rankings (for undergraduate programs), relatively high NRC graduate-level econ program rankings (by R-rank high score), or relatively high numbers of alumni-earned PhDs in economics. Of course, there are many other ways to assess college/program quality; these measurements may or may not be very appropriate for your needs.
Sources:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124724
(these are graduate program rankings … rather complex ones at that … but may be indicative of program quality at the undergrad level, too)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/VUECON/vu06-w11.pdf (old, but possibly still of interest for the approach)
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/webcaspar/ (for PhD production data; you may not find it too user-friendly, though)
FWIW, I usually don’t recommend choosing colleges by liberal arts department quality (unless it is a fairly low-demand field that many schools don’t even offer). I haven’t considered job placement stats in the suggestions above, but all/most of them presumably have good alumni early career outcomes (if only because they tend to attract many very capable and motivated students.) If you want less selective schools with good early-career prospects, then you might want to focus on good geographic locations for the kinds of jobs/internships that appeal to you
(like, maybe Charlotte NC for finance/banking jobs or DC for federal government).
However, economics can vary significantly in how heavily math and statistics are used. Some other subjects (e.g. history, math, biology) are broad enough that different departments may have very different subarea emphases.
This is confusing apples and oranges. Economics is not a business degree, it is a liberal-arts degree. It provides little more direct job training than any other liberal-arts degree. Few if any employers are looking for those with an undergrad Economics degree specifically.
The schools with good job placement status are going to be the ones where liberal-arts grads in any major are in demand.
@mikemac I agree with you in general. However, back in the day as an economics major, I got interviews with on campus recruiters who said they would look at any student with an econ or business major. Had I been political science or sociology, I wouldn’t have been eligible to submit my resume. Not all companies were like that, but some were.
While true in theory, many students do use economics as a substitute for a business major, some colleges (particularly those without true business majors) do offer business-like courses such as “managerial economics” in their economics departments, some colleges that have a business division have the economics department in their business division rather than their liberal arts division, and at least one college gives its business major the degree title “BS in Economics”.