<p>While researching graduate economic programs, I observed that different schools require different amounts of math preparation. At first this didn’t surprise me, after all one would expect MIT’s program to be more quantitatively sophisticated than Washington States. However as I continued to investigate, I saw that the texts that each department uses are fairly standard between schools i.e. there are only several graduate level micro/macro books. So do the top programs cover the texts in greater detail or/and do their lectures expand on the content with more of a quantitative emphasis? Basically, I am confused how one only needs Calc I, II and intro to stats to matriculate at some places, while others strongly recommend (essentially require) real analysis, linear algebra, etc, even though their syllabuses appear very similar.</p>
<p>please BUMP.</p>
<p>I would recommend asking this on the econphd website forum. Search it on google.</p>
<p>Okay, thanks for the referral.</p>
<p>I would just give you the URL, but it doesn’t show up.</p>
<p>That website has a great group of people talking about the process of getting Econ Ph.D’s. Hope it helps.</p>
<p>It seems that econphd.net doesn’t have a forum?</p>
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<p>It most likely has to do with the difference in difficulties of admission and of successfully graduating among the various programs.</p>
<p>Every economics program wants students to be as mathematically strong as possible. The difference of course is that the lower-ranked programs obviously tend to wind up with a less qualified pool of students to choose from than do the top-ranked programs, as somebody who gets into MIT and Washington State is probably going to choose MIT. So the lower-ranked programs have to dip lower into the pool. Similarly, the lower-ranked programs tend not to demand as high of a level of mathematical acumen in order to graduate. The top programs have strong brand names to protect on the academic job market (as MIT clearly doesn’t want to be sending out new Econ PhD’s who are mediocre at math) and hence won’t graduate anybody who can’t prove that their mathematical skills are strong, but the lower-ranked programs can’t enforce those same standards (otherwise, given their lower-quality student pool, they might not graduate anybody).</p>
<p>[PhD</a> in Economics - TestMagic Forums](<a href=“http://www.urch.com/forums/phd-economics/]PhD”>http://www.urch.com/forums/phd-economics/). Sakky, I understand your reasoning, thank you for your input.</p>