How good is the economics program?

commodore08
Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:31:51 +0000

I’m an Economics major. It’s a good program. I’m going to law school, so I can’t say whether it helped me get a job or not.

Stanford is almost certainly better as it is in most disciplines. While graduate school rankings do not perfectly correlate with the quality of an undergraduate program, it’s probably a safe approximation. Stanford is only behind MIT and the University of Chicago in USNWR most recent ranking of Graduate Economics programs.

UCLA, Michigan, and Wisconsin are all tied with Columbia for 11th in the USNWR ranking. I believe Duke is 21st.

As far as I know, Dartmouth doesn’t have a graduate program for Economics. So, it’s not ranked by USNWR.

Evaluating the strength of the economics department really depends on your aspirations. If you want to become an economist, then maybe the USNWR helps. Stanford is certainly the best. It would appear that Wisconsin, UCLA, and Michigan would be the next best, but they are all very large schools. You would probably need to be more persistent to work with the best professors to do research. Duke would fall below them. UVA and Vandy would probably be a little worse.

Take that with a grain of salt, because I doubt the minimal difference in ranking among Wisconsin, Michigan, UCLA, and Duke would result in different prospects for graduate school admissions. I could very well be wrong, but I imagine that your GRE, recommendations, and research you have done matter more than the name on your diploma.

Although Dartmouth has no USNWR report ranking with which to approximate the strength of its undergraduate program, I assume it would be quite strong. Dartmouth is a great school and I doubt any of its departments are weak.

I don’t know enough about graduate level economics to make any defiinitive statements except for Stanford being better than every other school you mentioned.

If you want to major in economics as an undergrad because you want to go into investment banking or management consulting after undergrad, then Stanford, Dartmouth, and Duke are all better than Vanderbilt. I think UVA and Michigan are probably on par with Vandy. They both have undergrad business programs that are very well respected. I don’t know enough about the other schools to evaluate them with regards to business prospects.

I’d go to Stanford, because it’s a great school and gorgeous. Really, they are all great choices. You can’t go wrong.