UMICH, UIUC, or UW Madison

Alexandre
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:16:32 +0000

“Wisconsin econ has easily passed by UM which has lost many top people while UW was hiring same including one of UM’s top people.”

barrons, your statement would suggest that Wisconsin is far superior to Michigan in Econ. Only 8 Econ departments in the nation have the depth, breadth and quality of Economics faculty to be significantly better than Michigan, and Wisconsin is not one of them. Michigan has lost only a handful of notable faculty members but has also gained several equally important members in recent years. All in all, Michigan’s Economics department has neither declined nor improved in recent years. Wisconsin has indeed been on the move and improved from slightly weaker than Michigan to slightly better than Michigan in Econ. One must remember that a department as complex as Economics, which often has a faculty that numbers well over 70 spread across several subdivisions and shares faculty with several other programs, does not improve or decline drastically simply by hiring a half dozen star professors.

At the moment, I would say that the top Economics departments in the nation are Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford closely followed by Cal, Northwestern and Yale. Those are the top 8 and the only Economics departments I would qualify as being significantly better than Michigan in that field. Next would come Columbia, Penn and Wisconsin, closely followed by CMU, Michigan, Minnesota, NYU, UCLA and UCSD.