San Francisco — The undergraduate major in economics is generally healthy, but it would be stronger if faculty members had better skills in presenting the discipline to the vast majority of their students who do not want to become academic economists. That is the verdict of a draft report to be discussed here Saturday during the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.
The report was drafted by David C. Colander, a professor of economics at Middlebury College, and KimMarie McGoldrick, a professor of economics at the University of Richmond. It is one of a series of reports supported by the Teagle Foundation in an effort to promote “fresh thinking” about various undergraduate majors.
The good news, according to Mr. Colander and Ms. McGoldrick, is that most undergraduate economics departments continue to offer a broad education that speaks to students who might pursue business, public policy, or academic careers. A new national survey has found that a large majority of economics majors are satisfied with their programs.
But the authors fear that as doctoral education in economics becomes more technical and abstract — a trend Mr. Colander has criticized elsewhere — new faculty members are badly prepared to teach economics to undergraduate students with diverse interests.
Doctoral economics programs, the authors write, are “more and more reliant on mathematics and statistics and less and less focused on ideas relevant to teaching undergraduate majors who are interested in a liberal education, rather than learning economics as a technical science.”
The danger, Mr. Colander and Ms. McGoldrick write, is that the undergraduate major will start to mirror the doctoral programs, becoming “far more technical than it currently is,” which would in turn make it “a much smaller undergraduate major with fewer direct links to liberal education goals.”
The authors suggest that some undergraduate programs might divide into an “economic science” major and an “economic policy” major. They also urge doctoral programs to offer more training in pedagogy.
On the latter point, a different conference panel on Saturday will explore how well doctoral students in economics are trained to teach. Among the papers scheduled to be presented at that panel are:
A survey of department chairs, which found that most programs try to evaluate their graduate teaching assistants’ performance in the classroom, but that many programs offer little or no formal training in pedagogy. “We are perplexed as to why most economics departments do not require that their graduate-student instructors take a credit course on teaching,” the authors write. “Teaching is a complex skill that can be difficult to master on your own.”
A survey of recent economics Ph.D.’s about how well they feel their doctoral programs prepared them to teach. Sixty-five percent answered “well” or “very well,” but a significant minority was less satisfied.
A study of the effectiveness of graduate teaching assistants in a large economics course at the University of Virginia over a 15-year period. Some previous studies have found that foreign-born teaching assistants are associated with lower student grades, but this study found no such relationship. The study also found that, in general, the presence of female teaching assistants does not help to close the gender gap in course grades.
—David Glenn
