<p>Can you give me info on UDel vs Rutgers vs UMass vs Lehigh? 1st three will be as part of honors pgm.</p>
<p>Thank you</p>
<p>There aren’t undergraduate rankings of departments. College gives you a broad liberal arts education; only roughly 1/3 of your classes will be in economics, and you can get a great economics education at any of those universities. Some people use graduate rankings as a proxy, but I think that’s a mistake. A school with excellent graduate economics education doesn’t necessarily have the same things that make them a successful educator of undergraduates, and those rankings leave out colleges without PhD programs.</p>
<p>With that said, the best way to determine this is to flip through the course catalog and the courses that were offered in the past two years. How often are the required courses offered? Can you put together a schedule that will allow you to graduate in 4 years? All colleges will have those core courses in economics, but what kinds of electives are offered? Look at the professors who are teaching the courses. Are they the full-time tenure-track professors listed on the website, or are they mostly STAFF (which means they are planning to hire an adjunct) or a professor that’s not listed on the website (which usually means it’s an adjunct)? Check out the profiles of the professors who are teaching the econ classes. Are they active in the field? Have they written articles for scholarly journals, or written books?</p>
<p>For economics specifically, if you are considering preparing for PhD study in economics, check the math prerequisites of the intermediate microeconomics and econometrics courses. If the school offers those courses with more advanced math prerequisites (multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations), that may be preferable for pre-PhD students. Offering additional mathematical economics courses is also desirable in this case. Pre-PhD students also want to take additional advanced math courses (e.g. real analysis).</p>
<p>Thank you, you’ve given me a lot to work with! I wonder if I could carry the conversation a step further…</p>
<p>My son is going for the liberal arts route, planning to major in econ (although you never know). He is likes his AP Statistics class. </p>
<p>Do you think it’s a mistake for me not to encourage him to go the undergrad business pgm route? I think liberal arts has great value but I also know many graduates do not feel job-ready; rather, they are on the grad school track. I am hoping the schools from which we are choosing offer a good variety of courses so he can have strong liberal arts but also take classes on the business school side.</p>
<p>Thank you again for you input!</p>
<p>One note I heard from a few Econ grad students at a summer econ course I took: if your goal is to continue studying Econ at the graduate level, you need to demonstrate a strong quantitative background to have a chance at most decent/top programs. </p>
<p>Most advised undergrad Econ majors to do a BS instead of a BA and take enough advanced math courses to almost fulfill a second major in math to be competitive for Econ grad school. </p>
<p>Incidentally, their undergrad majors were mostly engineering or a math-intensive natural science(Physics, Math). </p>
<p>Here are some web sites with recommendations for students considering PhD study in economics:
<a href=“Preparation | Department of Economics”>Preparation | Department of Economics;
<a href=“http://economics.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/selection-advice”>http://economics.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/selection-advice</a>
<a href=“Mark Borgschulte, University of Illinois - berkeleyclassesirecommend”>https://sites.google.com/site/markborgschulte/berkeleyclassesirecommend</a></p>
<p><a href=“econphd.net Admission Guide”>http://econphd.econwiki.com/guide.htm</a></p>
<p>this is an excellent site for information on what they look for in in candidates for econ grad school</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about the programs you’ve listed, but I have some thoughts on doing Econ through arts and sciences vs. through the business school. It pretty much depends on what he’s interested in and what he wants to study, and you’d also have to look at the requirements of the particular school. My D is a double major in math and econ. She’s doing her econ through the business school at her university. This means that she’s taking accounting, finance, marketing, management, etc. instead of electives in other disciplines. That’s fine with her, because that’s what interests her. She’s on a course that might lead to a job in business analytics or some kind of applied economics. If she was interested in pure economics and a PhD, she might do better in the non-business program where she’d have more flexibility because she wouldn’t need to take the core business classes. </p>