<p>
Caltech and MIT are not major research universities? More specialized, certainly, but major research universities nonetheless. Looking purely at ranks also distorts the numbers involved. There is a much larger gap between #1 Caltech (35% receive PhDs) and #7 Chicago (10-15% receive PhDs) than between Chicago and schools much further down on the ranking, for instance. </p>
<p>In any case, that’s not the case for econ majors. The number of econ PhDs per capita (per 1000 students) places Chicago at #15, behind Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and several LACs. The number of econ PhDs per undergraduate econ degrees places Chicago outside the top 25. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu06-w11.pdf”>http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu06-w11.pdf</a></p>
<p>Chicago has averaged about 8 PhDs in econ per year in the last 5 years. According to IPEDS, it produced 223 primary majors in econ last year, and no doubt quite a few more were secondary concentrators. </p>
<p>Chicago econ majors seem no more intellectually inclined than their compatriots at similar top universities. Where the two differ is a somewhat greater willingness, pressure, and/or ease for, say, an art history major to go into consulting than academia at Harvard than at Chicago. Given that Chicago’s student body is increasingly indistinguishable from those of peer schools, I expect even these small differences will shrink.</p>