Awesome schools for economics??

interesteddad
Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:23:17 +0000

Right. That list above is for engineering, which actually produces large numbers of PhDs. Economics PhDs are much rarer. There are only 11 undergrad schools in the US that produced 50 or more Econ. PhDs over that 10-year period from 1994-2003:

115 Harvard University
104 University of California-Berkeley
70 Stanford University
67 Cornell University, All Campuses
63 Yale University
63 University of Pennsylvania
63 University of Wisconsin-Madison
62 University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
58 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
57 Swarthmore College
53 Princeton University

PhDs are obviously more common in engineering and the sciences because of the research career tracks in those fields. That’s why the really top tech schools (MIT, CalTech, Harvey Mudd, etc.) tend to fall at or near the top of the overall PhD production.

BTW, these raw totals above illustrate the problem of not applying a per capita correction. Obviously, Stanford producing 70 Econ PhDs from 7000 undergrads is different than Wisconsin producing a similar number from a much larger student population.

I disagree that the list shows nothing about Princeton. The Econ PhD lists actually show clearly that Princeton is a leader in producing academic economists – future professors, World Bank poo-pahs, etc.