<p>Does anyone have recent rankings for economics major? If not, what would you say the ranking should be?</p>
<p>Also, can someone list the USNews Rankings for Economics? Thanks.</p>
<p>I'll bump this.</p>
<p>unofficial...just what ive heard based on quality and prestige...</p>
<p>Harvard, Chicago, Yale, Princeton, Stanford</p>
<p>MIT, Columbia, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Penn</p>
<p>Cornell, Georgetown, UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon</p>
<p>Ranking undergraduate programs is almost impossible, with the exception of highly specialized programs that are either rare or small (engineering psychology, sometimes linguistics, architecture or pre-architecture, HCI, industrial design, etc). If you're really trying to rank undergraduate programs I'd say generally you should look at the strength of graduate programs. The reason I emphasize generally is that there can be disconnections between graduate and undergraduate departments, or in the cases of larger schools like UCB just as a result of supply and demand a lot of times your access to the best those schools have to offer will be limited.</p>
<p>An example I have a habit of using is Lawrence, which is a small, not particularly prestigious liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Lawrence has arguably the single best physics program of any LAC, and if you take into account individualized attention it's probably not all that far behind the greats (Princeton, UCB, MIT, ISU, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, etc)--but they have no graduate program, so if you were going solely off graduate programs you'd still be cheating yourself by missing a school like that.</p>
<p>Ranking undergraduate programs is something you need to be wary of, especially if you're going to make any serious decisions based on those rankings. In the instance of what corruptbargain said, I'd put Amherst, Williams, Claremont-McKenna and Pomona above pretty much everyone in his third tier with the exception of CMU and Cornell. I'd probably put Grinnell, Reed, Hamilton, Carleton and Middlebury above them too.</p>
<p>The better way for you to create a list of schools is to focus on your potential future interests. Are you going into economics because you love economics and you might want to study it in graduate school, or are you going into economics because you think it's your best bet for getting into the world of business? If it's the former, you're going to be better off with smaller, focused schools that have high phd productivity numbers (like the aformentioned LACs or research universities)--they'll give you the one on one attention, they'll probably be more flexible and allow you to take a lot of math courses (which you need for graduate school), and you'll probably get better recommendations out of them. If it's the latter, you've got to look at schools that are prestigious and big but not too big so you can take advantage of the alumni network.</p>
<p>Alexandre posted his rankings a long time ago and I thought they were pretty good, you can probably do a forum search to find them. Just keep in mind that rankings, at the undergraduate level especially, are questionable. And when it comes to specific programs they're almost completely unreliable. Your best bet is finding the best "overall" school you can, one that has a strong alumni network, has good survey of earned doctorate numbers, has a solid social scene and multiple strong programs. At the graduate level you can specialize, but at the undergraduate level you're really better off just trying to get into the school with the best overall everything.</p>
<p>Some believe that an undergrad school that produces a disproportionate share of future PhDs in a field demonstrates that it has a high quality undergrad program in that field. If you accept this, here is a list of them for economics (first posted by interesteddad):</p>
<p>Number of PhDs per 1000 grads
Academic field: Economics </p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database</p>
<p>Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database<br>
Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period </p>
<p>1 Swarthmore College 16
2 Grinnell College 7
3 Williams College 7
4 Carleton College 7
5 Harvard University 6
6 Agnes Scott College 6
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5
8 University of Chicago 5
9 Yale University 5
10 California Institute of Technology 5
11 Princeton University 5
12 Macalester College 5
13 Stanford University 4
14 Pomona College 4
15 Oberlin College 4
16 Wellesley College 4
17 Trinity University 4
18 Bowdoin College 3
19 Earlham College 3
20 Berea College 3
21 Amherst College 3
22 Wabash College 3
23 Bard College 3
24 Rocky Mountain College 3
25 Coe College 3
26 Wesleyan University 3
27 College of William and Mary 3
28 Colby College 3
29 Columbia University 3
30 Hillsdale College 3
31 Franklin and Marshall College 3</p>
<p>tetrishead,</p>
<p>i dont disagree with ur assessment i wasnt including LACs...just throwing my thoughts out there</p>
<p>Corruptbargain are you sure you would put USC so high up? iv been trying to find info on the USC economics program amd cant seem to find any. Where did you here that they had a good program? The little info i did find was quite negative and critical</p>