USC Trustee vs. UChicago for Economics

SoCalDad2
Sun, 23 Mar 2014 17:18:42 +0000

As UCBChemEGrad notes, the rankings you are looking at are for GRADUATE programs. Undergrad programs are the same at all schools. All from the same textbooks.

It would be crazy to pay an additional $160,000 because of a mistaken belief that UNDERGRAD econ at Chicago is better than at USC. Of course, there may be other reasons to favor Chicago.

If you plan to go to grad school in econ, and may end up taking GRADUATE level classes as an UNDERGRAD, then there may be advantages to going to a school with a higher ranked GRAD program. If your goal is to go to law school, then the GRAD ranking is irrelevant.

The reason that Chicago has a highly ranked GRAD program is because of the research done there. Unless you are a superstar UNDERGRAD econ major, you will never come in contact with any of that research.