Economics Departments across the country and around the world are engaged in a competitive struggle with other programs and disciplines for the hearts and minds of young students as they make choices regarding what program of study to enter out of high school.  Once in university, the struggle is not over as Economics Departments are then involved in retaining students as majors and the attrition rates can be high. The pressure on department chairs and faculty to be innovative and accountable is relentless.  Here are some suggestions on how to attract and retain students.

1.     Marketing is everything and what you call yourself is important.  Calling yourself just an “Economics” department is so 20^th century.  Why not rebrand and integrate pop culture into your academic positioning?  How about – “The Justin Bieber School of Economics” or even the “Charlie Sheen Institute for Advanced Analysis?”  After all, like Mr. Sheen,  are we not tired of pretending we are not special?  Pop culture can even be worked into your first year classes – why not use the $5,500 price paid for Justin Bieber’s sneaker on eBay as the entry into a lecture on economic rent?  Borrowing from Lady Gaga, economics and popular culture need not be a bad romance.

2.     Getting them into your program is not enough – you have to work hard at keeping them.  Customer loyalty and incentive programs are important.  Why not Frequent Lecture Points?  Combine the student card with an electronic classroom attendance monitoring system and for every ten consecutive lectures attended you get a prize – a box of Timbits or a free coffee.  Combine the Frequent Lecture Program with a fund raising partnership with iTunes, The Bay or Macy's and you will be the darling of university advancement officers everywhere.  Other possible incentives include class policies like – “Satisfaction guaranteed or your tuition refunded” or “hand in your assignment by the due date and get five percent towards your next economics course”.

3.     Students today are connected and social networks are everything!  Use the power of Facebook and Twitter and have students recruit for you.  Offer a bounty for new majors.  It does not have to be cash – it could be a premium subscription to your Economics seminar series or a free lunch with the Department instructor of your choice.  Make it into a game!  Offer points for the most attractive students recruited from other programs into your program.  How about ten points for a math or physics major who switches into economics, eight points for a engineering major and say three points for sociology.  It’s a continuum of choice between 0 and 10, you can fill in the rest however you like to meet your recruitment needs.

4.     Do your students really dislike having that one course that drags down their grade point average?  Was it your economics course?  Afford your students more choice via bankable grade points transferable across courses.  A student who gets a 95 percent in a course can accept a lower mark and bank the difference in a grade account that even collects interest and can then be applied to courses with lower marks.  They can use their accumulated grade points to bump up their other courses into As or loan the grades out to their friends. 

5.     Of course, bankable grade points assumes that students have some As to start with – or as we say in the lingua franca of economics, an initial endowment.  For those that do not, there is always the Grade Equalization Program.  Simply tax the grades of all the students in the class at a mutually agreeable rate and then redistribute the grades to those students whose mark prior to the transfer was below the class average.  In the process of implementing your grade tax, you may even be able to demonstrate the difference between lump sum, ad valorem, regressive and progressive taxation.  However, using the term  "below average" is not particularly sensitive or astute so you will have to market the program as “equalizing academic capacity” or “structured performance enhancement”.

I hope you find these suggestions of help.  Recruiting and retaining students is hard work but the path can be eased in innovative ways and innovation is always in the forefront of any worthwhile Canadian initiative. Happy April 1^st.