Not sure, haven’t seen any data. Not to mention econ isn’t easy for many, nor interesting. 
My advice is generally that students should major in what they like and where they can get good grades if they are targeting certain banking roles or consulting.
I am a huge Williams fan. Just putting it out there- I have interviewed and hired Williams students for decades.
But you are confusing Selection effect and Treatment effect. Williams offers a fine econ program- and so do another 65 or so colleges in the US. Recruiters are not hiring the Williams kids because of the “very special secret sauce” of the Williams Econ department; they are hiring them because the Williams Adcoms did a fine job four years earlier of selecting a class which is thick on the ground with the kinds of kids who tend to do well in hyper competitive fields.
There is one “secret sauce” department at Williams- and that’s Art History. (a field you likely would not have paid for according to your post). For a rural area, the region is rich with people making art, studying art, writing about art, etc. and for a small college, the faculty is considered renowned (not by me- by actual subject matter experts). So paying for an Art History major at Williams is a very rational decision.
Econ? Your kid may get hired into MBB consulting or not; may get hired into a top tier bank or not. Goldman isn’t hiring Williams- it is hiring a particular student at that moment, who may or may not meet the hiring criteria. Or may meet the hiring criteria- but your kid has the bad luck to be graduating into a year of reduced hiring targets. None of us can predict the labor markets.
Ask the fantastic and brilliant kids who graduated in 2010 who were a “lock” at Lehman (gone), Bear Stearns (gone) and every other institution… which were hiring in the dozens vs. the hundreds pre-financial crisis.
What happens if your kid graduates into a recession? You going to get a refund from Williams because your kid has to take a job as an analyst at a P&C insurance company (a fine job and career path btw but nowhere near as renumerative as M&A)???
Florida State only recently (2023) started requiring calculus for its economics major: https://coss.fsu.edu/economics/undergraduate-program/major-requirements/
Somehow, the Penn State economics BA program does not list calculus in its degree plan: https://econ.la.psu.edu/undergraduate/major/bachelor-of-arts-in-economics/
University of Chicago’s business economics does not list calculus: Economics < University of Chicago Catalog
Page 20 of https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2023/program/powerpoint/by3dE895 gives some percentages of economics majors that require various math and other courses. Even STEM designated economics majors do not universally require single-variable calculus (94.3%), statistics (97.0%), and basic econometrics (88.4%), though non-STEM designated economics majors are less likely to require single-variable calculus (78.6%) and basic econometrics (56.1%).
Oh I totally agree, it is absolutely selection bias, and all of the schools being discussed have similar effects. Having a Williams or Wharton, or swathmore, or harvard and Dartmouth (which for some reason are not being discussed) gives a boost for jobs not because they offer somehting but because of the name. I am sure in recessions grads from schools like Binghamton, or Emory, or other fine but not as connected schools will have even bigger issues getting jobs.
We’re among the suckers who would pay for Williams if our kid just really liked Williams, and wanted to explore their academic options while there.
The totals above are for what IPEDS calls “primary major.” For double majors, this may be which of the 2 majors the university lists first on the IEPDS form.
I am that “sucker” and we have no regrets 
(Lucky that we had been able to set up a 529 when our daughter was born. We would have happily paid for all of the SLACs she considered, and recognize what a privilege that is.)
Depending on how “first major” is determined in IPEDS, combinations such as these could, hypothetically, lower the number of economics majors reported by Williams to below the actual figure.
Thank you for your honesty. Out of curiosity, how would you feel if your son changed his major or changed his interest from finance/consulting to a different field? How much background does your son have on finance and consulting careers?
We would make it work. He will take full advantage of a Williams education and it is a great place for him. We have no issue if he changes his mind but if he knew he was doing something preprofessional or music then it would have made more sense to pay less. He has only had exposure to finance through family members and a smaller school where there are lots of options and connections for internships will help him figure out what is best for him.
Thanks for the information.
I wonder about prerequisites for some of those courses though. At my LAC we do not list Calc as part of the Econ major, but when you look at the individual required courses to complete the major, they have Calc as a prerequisite. So anyone looking at the Econ major in the catalog would think little to no math is involved, but you cannot register for some of the courses if you haven’t already completed certain math. I wonder if that might be the case with Penn State and others.
Unsurprisingly, we are doing that for our kids as well. Honestly, there is so much good fortune in that–my wife and I were both good fits for professional careers that went relatively smoothly, we had a stable marriage with compatible values that included valuing saving and education, we lived in a modest cost of living metro . . . you don’t necessarily need all that specifically, but obviously most families cannot reasonably save that much, and that of course is fine.
The required intermediate economics courses at PSU and FSU do not list calculus as a prerequisite. PSU does have honors versions which do list calculus as a prerequisite, though enrollment appears to be much smaller for the honors versions than the non-calculus regular versions.
I note this tool allows you to combine or separate first and second majors:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jonboeckenstedt/viz/BachelorsDegreesAwardedin2022/Dashboard1
Not as handy, but you can look up Econ, say (you have to get the right one–Williams is under Econometrics) and learn in that set, Williams had 90 first majors, and 17 second.
This is probably even more relevant in smaller majors. In that data set, Williams had 7 in Classics for first, 2 for second, so that is materially helping. And then in French, it was only 1 first, but 7 second, which is very common for modern languages (to primarily be a second major).
Which is why many employers ask for a transcript for both internships and fulltime after graduation roles. Students hate it. But there is a material difference in the skillset of someone who took “here’s the demand curve, here’s the supply curve, here’s where they intersect” econ vs. someone who is fully trained in the analytical and mathematical tools used by actual economists!
Yes, it matters. Taking “Buyer Behavior for Marketing Majors” is NOT the same as a statistics course (covering the same general topic area, but with actual regression analysis and DOING the math, not just explaining what the numbers show).
Rigor matters.
Another list is below that considers both primary and secondary major. I also listed 2nd and 3rd most common major grouping for comparison.
Highest % of Students with Either First or Second Major = Econ
- CMC – 39% Econ, 23% Other Social Science, 16% Multidisciplinary
- Chicago – 36% Econ, 14% Other Social Science, 12% Biology
- Trinity – 23% Econ, 26% Other Social Science, 12% Biology
- Williams – 21% Econ, 17% Other Social Science, 14% Physical Sciences
- Lafeyette – 20% Econ, 24% Engineering, 21% Other Social Science
- Colgate – 19% Econ, 26% Other Social Science, 14% Biology
- Swarthmore – 19% Econ, 13% Other Social Science, 13% Computer Science
- Amherst – 18% Econ, 16% Biology, 16% Other Social Science
- Hamilton – 18% Econ, 20% Other Social Science, 16% Biology
- Bowdoin – 18% Econ, 25% Other Social Science, 18% Biology
While there are exceptions, most of the colleges above are LACs that have relatively few pursuing tech. If I look at selective colleges with lowest % econ, the the distribution tends to be far more tech heavy. Reed is an obvious exception.
Lowest Non-zero % of Students with Either First or Second Major = Econ
- GeorgiaTech – <1% Econ, 51% Engineering, 21% CS
- Harvey Mudd – <1% Econ, 26% Multidisciplinary, 22% Engineering
- Cal Poly – 1% Econ, 23% Engineering, 17% Business
- Florida – 3% Econ, 13% Engineering, 12% Business
- Reed – 3% Econ, 19% Other Social Science, 11% Bio (tie) / 11% Foreign Language (tie)
Colleges with undergraduate business majors may also get smaller numbers of economics majors, since they would have fewer students choosing economics as a substitute business major. GT, CPSLO, and UF seem to fit this description.
You have moxy to compare Emory to Binghamton? Especially when Emory has better Investment Banking placement than Williams per the data set posted by another user. If anything Williams and other LACs have been on the decline for a while.
Um…The peak frameworks link you psted has Williams at 35 and Amherst at 40. And this is the kost accurate placement ranking.
So the ranking you are looking at combines 2/3rds total hires with 1/3rd undergrad %. I am looking just at undergrad %, what I called “per capita”.
The argument at that link for that measure is that author felt like per capita measures were unfairly penalizing larger public schools, and the author believes it is generally better to go to larger schools, so wanted to come up with a measure that would help larger schools do better against smaller schools. But I think the actual evidence is very much against that author’s view on that subject. Indeed, the author has internally contradictory logic. Consider this:
From an expected value perspective, a firm would rather visit Columbia than Claremont McKenna even if their Undergrad Placement % is similar. Why fight over the two kids that want to do banking at Claremont McKenna when you can get swarmed by an army of Columbia kids foaming at the mouth?
And then contrast it with this:
Even if you ask the proudest NYU graduate (which I did), they’d probably be reluctant to say that their school is the 2nd best place to get into investment banking from. NYU produces a ton of high-quality candidates, but you’d still rather be at Harvard where it’s significantly easier to impress both headhunters and your parents.
That’s essentially the same comparison, and all he really did was take the Ivy League side of it each time, using opposite logic to justify his two opposite positions. And I note he actually chose a higher per capita college (Columbia) for the CMC comparison, which loaded the question.
And it is easy to play that game a different way. For example, I think it would clearly be a real mistake to think that, say, Penn State is a better choice than Williams if you are interested in IB (Penn State being at 33). There is no way the far higher volume at Penn State somehow outweighs Williams being a highly selective college with an extremely robust alum network in finance.
So I think that author had it right when he said:
It’s not really possible to determine a denominator that is fair to all schools
I think he should have just stopped there, rather than trying to come up with a formula that got Harvard and Columbia where he thought they should be, ignoring all the other clear misguidance that produced.
In any event, since we were discussing the percentages of graduating students with different majors, the relevant IB measure to inform that discussion would be the per capita measure.