It's hardly a secret to anyone who's worked in an economics department: some students enrol in economics because they want to study something that seems vaguely useful, but they don't have the grades, or the mathematics and language skills, to make it in business or engineering.
Economics programs typically have relatively few essay requirements, and require little by way of verbal skills. Relative to traditional arts and humanities subjects, the reading lists are short and manageable. The math gets challenging at more advanced levels, but most of undergraduate economics requires nothing more than high school level calculus. My third year course (open to non-majors) requires about grade 10 or 11 level algebra.
As a result, at most Canadian universities, economics attracts some students who are not strong academic performers (if they were, they were be in their first choice, business), and who don't have much intrinsic interest in economics. They just want a qualification that will help them to get a job.
At this time of year, while I'm marking final exams, I despair for them, yet I'm sympathetic to their plight. Is it so unreasonable for them to expect to get some useful, job related training at a university?
I'm attempting to teach the knowledge and skills that a person would need to analyze policy – to be an economic journalist, a policy analyst in government, to work at a think tank. It's job related training – but for a particular, highly specialized type of job. Why do markets fail? Do programs like the Working Income Tax Benefit increase work incentives? What are the impacts of introducing school voucher programs? How does Canada's equalization program change people's incentives to migrate between provinces, and impact economic efficiency?
Realistically, the students who are struggling to pass third year economics courses are never going to be policy analysts or economic journalists. So what am I teaching them that would help them in the job market?
I wouldn't hire someone in an office job unless they could write a memo relatively free from spelling and grammatical errors. But I don't teach spelling and grammar. Like just about everybody else in the university system, I figure that's not my job. If students want to improve their English skills, they have to pay for special English-language classes. (I could force people to improve their English by taking off marks for every single spelling or grammatical error, but this hardly seems like a way to help and nurture new Canadians and international students either).
I don't teach students anything that would help them to run a business – no accounting, nothing about hiring or firing workers, or human resource management. It's not that I think these things are unimportant – I am very glad that, back in the day, I took some courses in accounting, and would highly recommend them to anyone. But I can't teach accounting. Ironically, it is precisely those useful courses, the training type courses that would help a moderate student find a job working in a financial institution or small business, that students are being shut out of, because business schools have relatively high admission requirements and restricted enrolments.
My students want to learn about the macro economy, about what makes the economy grow, what makes businesses more profitable, what drives innovation. I teach mainstream microeconomics, which means I don't talk at all about the macroeconomy, or jobs and growth. Profits? In a competitive market, economic profits are equal to zero. Innovation? Technology is exogenous, outside the model.
Why not? Well, there is the problem of me being a micro person, but I could fake it. More seriously, there are two ways to talk about the macro implications of specific policy proposals. One is the simplistic "Increasing the size of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Fund increases savings which increases investment which grows the economy." Sure one can say these things – and it sounds great, and so convincing – but is there any evidence? Any sound theory? No. The other is the incredibly complex: "Increasing the size of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Fund would require increasing premiums, which might or might not crowd out private savings. And then there is the question of how the CPP investment fund is invested – can overseas investments, or investments in real estate, really be thought to grow the Canadian economy…" Then we're back to square one – material that just goes right over people's heads.
I called this post "The dirty secret of economics education". But, in fact, it's the dirty secret of post-secondary education more generally: we're teaching students what we want to teach. Sometimes that's what students want to learn. Sometimes it's not.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Business more academic than economics? The very opposite is true in the UK.
Britonomist – generally, business programs have higher admission averages than economics ones, yes. I wouldn’t equate that with being more academic, but anyways.
The UK has that complicated history where business is tainted because of its historical association with polytechnics (plus the traditional British distain for being “in trade” – all those snide remarks in Jane Austen about uncles or ancestors who are in trade).
“The UK has that complicated history where business is tainted because of its historical association with polytechnics (plus the traditional British distain for being “in trade” – all those snide remarks in Jane Austen about uncles or ancestors who are in trade).”
Very true. Still, I remember seeing a breakdown of majors by admission test scores in the US, and econ ranked amongst the highest, well above business, maybe Canada is just different?
Britonomist – it would depend whether you included community colleges or not. That would make a huge difference to the #s. I suspect the US data would include colleges, but Canadian data wouldn’t. This is an issue specific to the university sector.
Britonomist – I think you might be thinking of this, on LSAT scores of economics majors? http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Phil/upload/LSAT-Scores-of-Majors.pdf? The students I’m writing about wouldn’t be writing the LSAT.
Sample selection bias.
If I were an economics student, I would be in a state of academic- existentialism after reading this. Its more depressing than gender and population aging to the average 20something- jobsearching-almost graduated-econ undergrad.
Nice post Frances, this basically sums up my academic career. Went into mathematics originally and couldnt hack it, dropped out for a bit, went back for economics because it was “easier” and it was something I was becoming more interested in. Around third year I realized it was going to be a tough job market coming out with just a BA in economics for the exact reasons you state, I had no technical skills that would make me stick out from an average arts BA (not many businesses need mediocre econometricians). Luckily I made it into grad school and am now working doing policy analysis in an economic unit for the government. I cant say thats true for many people I’ve met who are now graduated. Many of them, even friends from my grad program, are unemployed or underemployed and it seems like its a hard position to get out of as your resume quickly becomes more important than your academic credentials.
Not sure if there is a solution. There must be general business programs in college that would benefit the average B student more than an econ BA. It would be really useful to have a course that teaches you advanced excel techniques and technical writing, I think that would interest most business owners and would have been the skills I have found would have been most useful in the work place.
Sheliza – It’s not every student. I’m enormously proud of all of my former students who are doing great things like working in the federal government’s accelerated economist training program, going off to law school, working as profs in policy schools – as well as students who are teaching English abroad or working in banks or working in the trades or running small businesses but enjoyed studying economics.
After all, a lot of specific training is pretty useless too – whatever computer program I teach students now will probably be obsolete in 10 years time – so there is a huge amount to be said for teaching general analytic skills.
But, yup, I’m a parent, and I worry about my kids’ futures.
Anecdata time!
– I can second the observation of economics being considered more academic and selective than business in the UK. Or management, the other go-to.
– I have been told, by multiple independent sources, that thirty years ago economics was considered a degree for students that couldn’t possibly pass anything else in Malaysia and Singapore. Today that has reversed. Correspondingly the content has become much harder. The speculatory reasons given by my sources all differed. I’m not really sure what this suggests, myself.
Ian: “It would be really useful to have a course that teaches you advanced excel techniques and technical writing, I think that would interest most business owners and would have been the skills I have found would have been most useful in the work place.”
I’ve started to include at least one Excel exercise in my second and third year courses. I get people to write an essay and do technical writing in the 4th year seminar course. So it’s not all bleak. But there is a trade-off: if I’m doing Excel training and technical writing I’m not teaching public policy. Plus, I kind of feel that with 4 required courses in statistics and econometrics, students should get some Excel training there (they get some, but I don’t know how much).
Plus there’s the practical matter: if I’ve got a student who’s a journalism major, and a student who is struggling to get by as an ESL student, how do I evaluate the two in terms of their technical writing? Do I hold them to the same standard? How to I design a curriculum that’s appropriate for both?
Remarkable than an economists would say this out loud.
Note well — it is economists who have turned economics into a joke of a subject to teach, and they did this because of a fake model of ‘science’ and because they wanted to create something easy to grade.
So via Samuelson and and rest it became something like teaching baby engineering to undergraduates.
Economists can teach students whatever they want to teach them — they’ve chosen to teach them junk ‘science’.
Peter Boettke actually teaches students to think economically in a many that improves their cognitive skills.
Boettke was fired by NYU after receiving the campus-wide award for undergraduate teaching.
This tells you all you need to know about what the profession of academic economics is all about.
The internet & technology can’t kill the university departments soon enough.
Greg: if you were in my third year course, you’d find I covered topics far from the fake model of science you decry – we spend a huge amount of time talking about market failures, about the role of government intervention in the economy, about public choice, interest groups, rent-seeking, bureaucracy, etc etc etc. It’s great stuff. You’d probably love it, given that you’re on this blog and here reading.
But it’s not for students who are looking for practical training on how to run a business – though they probably enjoy it much more than they would if I assigned them the latest issue of the Real World Economics Review to read – now that they would really struggle with! (I’ve tried assigning feminist readings in the course on gender and economics in the past).
On the plus side, economics courses almost always involve learning how to engage in deductive logic. If someone isn’t a strong student, I can think of worse ways they could spend their college years. I think economics education still makes people better off, even if it doesn’t translate into directly applicable skills.
To say nothing of the fact that every economics instructor I’ve ever met has demonstrated a passion for imparting these deductive logic techniques to their students.
Ian: “There must be general business programs in college that would benefit the average B student more than an econ BA.”
My father devoted his entire academic career to teaching in one and, yes, I think he got an enormous amount of satisfaction from the fact that he knew he was delivering something of value to students – and from seeing his students, who were often new Canadians who couldn’t afford university – go on to make better lives for themselves.
Ian – I’m not talking about the average B student. I’m talking about the average C/D student here.
Ryan – yup, I agree. But suppose I’m starting out assuming students are at level 4, and trying to move them up to level 5 or 6 or 7. What happens to the student who starts out at level 1 or 2. Do they get anything useful out of it at all?
My wife has a law degree, a business degree and an economics degree from top universities.
She knows the law, she knows business, and she knows math, but I wouldn’t say she remembers much of any economic math or remembers much about what any of was all suppose to prove.
Indeed, she got a better grasps of the fallacies and pathologies of most economist’s models of ‘monopoly’ from her law professors.
Great post, although I don’t think you need to target economics education, what you’ve identified is probably not a phenomenon that’s unique to economists, though I’d suggest that the self-awareness it demonstrates might be less common in some other academic disciplines. While I have a certain intellectual sympathy for those academics who say “look, it’s not our job to provide practical skills, that’s not what universities are for” (which view I’ve heard, in particular, from some the flakier social sciences and humanities), the reality is that isn’t what universities (and politicians, and parents, and guidance counsellors and high school teachers) tell their potential students (Do universities advertize, for example, that their classics graduates include some of the best educated barristas in the country? Or do they find the one classics graduate who became the CEO of a bank and put his or her picture in the recruitment brochure?).
I think you identify two of the bigger problems with the modern post-secondary education system. First, there are a lot of students who, frankly, should not be in university, and I think they’re probably a big chunk of the people you describe. It’s not that they’re not smart (although some of them are likely not as smart as their previous educational experiences might have led them to believe), it’s just that they lack the interest in, or enthusiasm for, the field they’re studying (or any other field that their university offers). As a result, they don’t get much intrinsic value out of an expensive (both for them and for society) 4-year degree. And if everyone’s going to unversity, it loses whatever signalling value it might have had as an indicia of general ability. These are people who might well benefit from some form of post-secondary education, but something less (and less expensive) than that offered by the traditional university. Mind you, to implement that would entail a massive shift in resources from the traditional universities to colleges or the sort of university colleges they have in BC, which I don’t see going over all that well with the stakeholders in the traditional universities.
Second, I think you’re observation about correcting spelling and grammar, while probably typical of the practice at most universities and departments (including UofT when I was a TA there), I think undermines the one practical skill that a traditional university education does provide – namely to think, write, argue and communicate coherently. While your observation that penalizing grammar and spelling might not “help and nurture new Canadians and international students” is well-intentioned, I’m not sure that it’s true. After all, the reality is that they will be expected to communicate with a degree of coherence when they graduate (the same might be said about meeting deadlines, another soft skill that universities have been slipping on – I’m fairly certain that I once got an A in a philosophy course because I was the only student to hand my term paper in on time, and the professor couldn’t fail the rest of the class). Far better to call their attention to issues like spelling and grammar in first year, in a university setting with resources (like a writing center) to help them, then to let it slide, and have them wonder why they can’t get a job interview when they graduate (since many employers, such as my own, toss applications with serious typos, spelling and/or gramatical errors into the “do not call” pile). Granted, it would be far better if these issues were addressed in high schools, but that’s a different matter.
“Greg: if you were in my third year course, you’d find I covered topics far from the fake model of science you decry – we spend a huge amount of time talking about market failures, about the role of government intervention in the economy, about public choice, interest groups, rent-seeking, bureaucracy, etc etc etc. It’s great stuff. You’d probably love it.”
Frances, I’m guessing I would enjoy it. From your posts here, I’m guessing I’d enjoy any class you taught.
What I’m thinking of are the intermediate and upper division micro and macro textbook courses taught in most universities.
I’m coming from a scientific explanatory paradigm — Coase, Hayek, Boettke — which identifies textbook economics as providing essentially a false picture of the economic process, a picture which assumes a false picture of explanation and causal processes.
And that is even before we get to the question pedagogics — what sort of teaching practices produce deep and lasting understanding and comprehension skill.
Memorizing the math models and then forgetting it all the in 3 years isn’t it (studies actually show that most graduates have forgotten most of the economics and economic math they were taught in just a few short years.)
“Indeed, she got a better grasps of the fallacies and pathologies of most economist’s models of ‘monopoly’ from her law professors.”
Oh dear, if she’s learning about economics (or its fallacies) from law professors… that’s kinda like taking economics lessons from David Suzuki.
There is a tension in economics between teaching the ‘tool box’ and teaching people to think economically and to help people understand the real world.
What wins out for a variety of reasons is simply teaching the ‘tool box’.
And eventually the ‘tool box’ comes to be understood in a fashion that:
1) isn’t compatible with the economic way of thinking
2) blocks people from understanding the real world
Examples
When blogger Scott Sumner goes on and on discussing things as if ‘utils’ were real entities what were actually economized and which were intersubjectively comparable, Houston, we’ve got a problem. The problem is ageless and well documented in academic economics.
How does ‘tool box’ economics block people from understanding the real world? Let me count the ways … I’ll give one example here — the mistakes in finance of the psst generations using ‘rocket science’ models assuming ‘given’ probability distributions and ‘given’ uncertainty terms, and no fat tails. A number of books in recent years have been written on the topic. The basic mistake has been duplicated when it comes to thinking about central planning, monopoly, competitive markets, anti-trust, utility price regulation, the Coase Problem, and on and on.
When I graduated from undergrad econ at a prestigious Canadian school, the head of the department had a sit-down-type-thing with a bunch of the graduating students to get feedback. One brave soul said that he feels like he hasn’t learned any “skills” like his friends in business, who might know how to use, say, Microsoft Access. He suggested doing more of “those kinds of things” throughout the econ degree instead of forcing students to take econ history or a bunch of options within econ.
The response? “Well, there are vocational schools and there are universities. Access if just a database, so if you want to learn Access go learn Access! We don’t teach how-to courses at universities.” It seemed like a reasonable response, but in line with the original post, it makes people feel ripped off when they apply for jobs and see something like “Experience with Access or SQL an asset” and they have no idea what that means.
Doing an Economics undergrad in Canada isn’t that bad of an idea. I was originally thinking of doing economics when I was in university but after a short time I came to realize the courses were not very challenging and I frankly felt rather embarrassed about being in some so soft as economics while most of the rest of my university friends were in engineering, math, computer science.
I switched into doing math and computer science and in the long run this was a huge mistake because whereas in economics I could easily get very high grades in math I mostly got B’s and a few A-‘s. In the end had I stuck with economics it would not have been difficult to get into a good grad program whereas with my math degree I ended up completely unemployed and basically stuck.
As for business, I wasn’t aware this was supposed to be an “elite” field. I’m afraid to say the content I’ve seen of these business courses doesn’t seem to take much in the way of intellectual fire-power, I don’t see these students doing more than memorizing buzzwords and silly charts. Perhaps the accounting courses are more difficult, I don’t know.
At the U. of Washington Paul Heyne taught at class on The Economic Way of Thinking.
The class at bottom focused on the role of alternative costs in making sense of life and the world.
Many students thought the class the most valuable and eye opening class they’d taken in college.
It was stuff they didn’t forget.
People talk about Milton Friedman’s class on Price Theory in the same way.
Heyne was essential teaching the baby economics of Wieser & Hayek, with great examples.
Friedman was essentially teaching the baby economics of Marshall with endless challenging examples.
That’s not teaching the ‘tool box’, that’s teaching thinking economically.
It’s most verbal and critical thinking and takes dedicated and focused teaching.
People talk about the University Economics course of Armen Alchian in a similar fashion.
Does this paradigm for teaching economics still exist in academia?
“As for business, I wasn’t aware this was supposed to be an “elite” field. I’m afraid to say the content I’ve seen of these business courses doesn’t seem to take much in the way of intellectual fire-power, I don’t see these students doing more than memorizing buzzwords and silly charts. Perhaps the accounting courses are more difficult, I don’t know.”
I’m not sure it’s an “elite” field, so much as one that is in high demand (which isn’t quite the same thing), meaning that business programs generally have a higher (often significantly so) admission threshold than your average humanities or social sciences program. While I’m with you that your typical business program isn’t neccesarily particularly intellectually challenging (and, lest I be accused of crapping on business schools, I think the same might be said of law as well), I think it does impart valuable practical skills on its graduates. Certainly, in my experience, there are often noticeable differences in the skill sets between my colleagues with a business background, and those with other backgrounds.
Seems like this is striking at the core question of “What’s the point of a University.” If we see a university degree as being a base job skill, we run into trouble, because universities aren’t structured to teach job skills. That’s why we have community colleges and technical schools. Universities are more structured to teach thinking skills, the ability to build on what we already know, rather than teaching any specific skill. If students are not bright enough to take whatever you’re teaching them and figure out how to go beyond that, then they’re really in the wrong place.
And if these mediocre students think they’d do any better with a business degree, they’d probably be disappointed. With an accounting specialty, sure. Accounting, let’s face it, (and I say this as an accountant) are really more like a trade than we like to admit. But a generic business management degree doesn’t qualify you for any jobs out of the gate. Nobody hires managers with no experience, and a generic management degree doesn’t confer any skills useful to entry level positions. My wife found this out the hard way, and ended up going to law school in order to get an actual job qualification.
The problem you note is certainly not unique to economics programs. It has a lot do with universities and their role, and the fact that they have acquired a tangle of intangible and incoherent symbolic value (locus of bourgeois values, vanguard of society, prestige, equalizer, builder of elites, etc.) that no one can resolve. The question is why a plausible alternative has not really emerged.
Neil, it’s true that community colleges and tech skills fill this role, but only in relation to the transfer of knowledge. What they don’t convey is prestige. There are praiseworthy people who don’t give a rat’s a$$ about that (electricians, MRI technicians, etc) and they will have jobs for life. But for the 19 year-olds that have been reared on bourgeois pseudo-intellectual values of watching the CBC, having lots of opinions, appearing cultured, etc., that kind of option involves what many perceive as a step down.
A modest proposal: Stop wasting students’ time teaching MV=Py, Y=C+I+G, AS/AD, IS/LM, and start teaching more finance. Students appreciate learning about long/short positions, calls and puts, forwards/futures, interest arbitrage, etc., and these are things that most economists are well-equipped to teach.
Shangwen – I think this is a huge issue for immigrant parents (and, by extension, their children) who come from countries where manual labour is poorly paid and stigmatized. That can’t imagine that becoming a carpenter or an electrician or a plumber would be a pathway for their child to become a successful and economically secure entrepreneur.
I have to get my marking finished. Will comment later.
My understanding of the earnings situation of economics grads is that they don’t do too badly, at least in comparison to the rest of Arts and the Social Sciences, so perhaps we are producing something of value.
On the question of practical skills, our program does require an IT course, in which they learn Excel skills among other things. We also have a required research methods course in which they are exposed to writing a variety of types of reports and some practical things like how to access CANSIM and so on. I think we can do that kind of thing. What surprises me as I look about is how few programs seem to.
Is it correct that in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Canada (maybe the US too?) business was the easy program to get into? That it only became fashionable in the late 1970’s/80’s?
A couple of vague thoughts:
Maybe there is some stuff we are teaching them that is very important that is just so commonplace to us we don’t even realise how important it is. Like opportunity costs. Comparing costs and benefits.
Mike Burns asks and answers a closely-related question: “What does Business want from Economics?”
@Greg That paradigm is rare in any field, not just economics.
When I was doing my degrees in English Literature, I was furious—furious—at how much time we wasted on biography. What’s the point of learning about where the author lived? We could be THINKING!
When I was doing my M.A. in English Literature, I prepared a long, thoughtful seminar on a poem that went on about the poem’s analysis of society and the utopian impulse, and, when I was done, the first question was, “I didn’t hear you say what city this author was born in.”
That’s the exact moment I decided to turn down the offer of a spot and funding for a PhD.
To be fair I came out of economics with few practical skills but I did come out with a very important skill, the ability to learn a lot of material at a rapid pace. I came into the office environment with zero skills in excel but my learning ability acquired from university allowed me to basically learn any excel skills in short notice that were required by the projects that my supervisor put me on. It’s practically a cliche but learning how to learn can be one of the most important skills and if you are really good at that you don’t really need any practical skills (barring stuff required for certifications like CFA, CA, etc)
I think the problem with Econ is that there really aren’t that many electives and there isn’t necessarily the demand from students in any specific area. I specialized in finance and so I did learn stuff about accounting, option pricing, etc but not everyone is in economics for that specific program. This means that the department has to spread its resources thin to accommodate other fields in economics that portions of the student popullation might be interested in such as history, labour, industrial organization, etc.
“But for the 19 year-olds that have been reared on bourgeois pseudo-intellectual values of watching the CBC, having lots of opinions, appearing cultured, etc., that kind of option involves what many perceive as a step down.”
I think it’s more fundamental than that. Your average high school student lives in an environment populated with people with university degrees – how many teachers are there without a university (other than Teacher’s college) degree? 50, 60 years ago, your average teacher might have had a year at Teacher’s college (normal school) and a high school diploma. Now, your average teacher will have, at least, an undergraduate degree, a 1 (or, in some province, 2) year teaching degree and possibly (given the inexplicable predilection of school boards to pay for credentials) a master’s degree. A high school diploma and a teacher’s certificate was apparently enough to equip the “Greatest Generation” to fight Nazis or put a man on the moon, but I guess it’s not enough to train the current generation of kids. Apart from the momumental waste of societal (and private) resources associated with that sort of educational overkill, is it any wonder that your average high school student graduates thinking that she needs a university degree (even if a “less prestigious” career path might be better suited for them and provide better opportunities) when the only non-university graduates they meet in schools are the janitor and the secretary?
(That isn’t intended to be a knock on teachers – although I’m a bit miffed at today’s strike. The University route is the career path that they know, it’s natural to expect that they’d encourage their charges to follow-it.)
What if economics was “professionalized” in the way that accountancy, law, densitry and medicine have professional associations that certify the “quality”, skill or knowledge of its members (and restrict competition)? Even a non-regulated professional body, similar to CFA Institute, or the Canadian Council of Human Resources Associations, might be able to raise the profile of economists as practicing professionals. That, in turn, could raise the quality of your average economics undergraduate student, particularly if post-grduation professonal salaries were to increase as well. Economics departments could then afford to be more picky about who they admit as students.
I suspect that one of the reasons professionalization might not work, given the small number jobs in industry for economists, and the dominance of academia as the preferred destination for economics graduates.
@Nick: “Maybe there is some stuff we are teaching them that is very important that is just so commonplace to us we don’t even realise how important it is. Like opportunity costs. Comparing costs and benefits.”
Didn’t you have a post once, something about “why everyone should take ECON 1000”? I don’t think the point of that post was that everyone should understand opportunity costs, and how to compare costs and benefits – but it could have been.
Look, by standard criteria I’m not a bad prof – close to a smiley face on ratemyprofessors, teaching evaluations at or above the departmental norm. But I’m failing to convey these ideas – e.g. benefit/cost analysis – to a significant percentage of my students. They deserve to get something useful out of their post-secondary education, and I don’t know if I’m delivering it to them.
B.t.w., that post by Mike Burns which you link to starts from a similar place: “Despite globalization and the associated increased need for understanding of the real and financial processes at work in the global economy, since the 1950’s there has been an ongoing significant and worldwide fall in the number and quality of undergraduates studying for an economics degree. Surprisingly, responses by the economics profession have included very little serious consideration of the factors underlying the actual and potential demand by business for their product.”
@Dan – yup, I understand exactly those dynamics. I think it’s exacerbated by the fact that a lot of profs are completely self-taught when it comes to computers and word processing (except perhaps that Cobol course we took as undergrads – ah, I remember the day when someone managed to write an infinite loop in computing class and crash the SFU system.) We think “I picked up Excel/Stata/R/Outlook on my own, why should anyone have to take a course in it?” Also, the kind of teaching facilities that one would need to do this kind of teaching – labs with good powerpoint projector systems, for example – are seriously lacking.
@Bob “Mind you, to implement that would entail a massive shift in resources from the traditional universities to colleges or the sort of university colleges they have in BC, which I don’t see going over all that well with the stakeholders in the traditional universities.”
Er, yes, which is why I hesitated before posting this, and am just hoping not too many people are reading.
The writing thing is a difficult one. You can hear more of my views on this on this CBC radio show: http://www.cbc.ca/babel/episodes/2012/06/27/how-important-is-spelling-these-days/. In fact the BC colleges are going the other way, all going towards being universities and forsaking their traditional mandates. Which I think is a real pity.
@Daniel – English is another subject with all sorts of fascinating and conflicting dynamics. I’m not even sure what English is these days.
@Jim – interesting on the IT course and the research methods. I do some related things in the 4th year seminar. On the earnings of econ grads. Corrected for gender? Also, I think returns to different degrees are changing over time – 2006 census data on earnings by degree, which is driven primarily by the experience of people who graduated 20 or 30 years ago, may be a misleading guide to the present.
@Mike – but so much of that finance has so little real econ behind it!
@Neil: “universities aren’t structured to teach job skills” Which is fine when 10% of the population gets a university degree. But when 30% of the population – or more in urban area, and in certain demographic groups – gets a university degree, the disconnect between universities and job skills starts becoming serious – this gets at the points Bob Smith raised above.
CBBB – As a biz skool drop-out, I agree with what you say about it – I knew that if I did a PhD in accounting, I could “write my own ticket”, but couldn’t stick it.
I’d advise anyone in your situation to do an math major/econ minor. The awesome grades you’re bound to get in econ will be enough for you to get funding for an MA if you’re a domestic student.
Er I should have said in my last sentence that academia was one of the preferred destinations for the cream of the crop of economics graduates. The number of academic economics positions and professional positions is surely outstripped by the number of people who graduate with undergraduate economics degrees.
Robillard: Frances had a prior post last year on whether or not economists should be licensed.
Skilled trades may not be a good bet for a young person starting off for much longer, even in AB. Most require apprenticeships to get started, but what I’m hearing is that firms in AB are figuring out that they can refuse to train apprentices, claim a labour shortage, and get temporary foreign workers in to do the work for much less, and without a union. That effectively shuts the door on kids wanting to get into trades.
I don’t know much about business grad prospects, but engineering is not exactly a road to interesting, well paid work. At least not the way students seem to believe it is when they are studying it. Mostly it is a road to middle management in a large firm, and these days those positions go to Biz Skool kiddies as often as they go to an engineer promoted from the ranks. And engineering work is mostly pretty boring. The fact is that unless you are a rock star with a PhD, nobody is going to let you anywhere near anything serious. There’s just too much at stake. That’s why most engineering is done by handbooks and established codes. The hard stuff is already worked out and you just look it up. So engineers end-up being project managers or sales/service people. A far cry from their youthful dreams of building space ships or F1 cars.
As for biz skool propects … well, the very large firm I used to work for canned the entire accounting dept. and outsourced it to … India. Yup. India. That was about the same time they closed their Indian operations because of a bribery scandal and the US execs where worried about it sticking to them. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
Frances, that was actually what attracted me to English Literature. I had the freedom to pursue almost any topic I wanted. My M.A. thesis was more philosophy than literature, and I lead a seminar class on the economics of utopias, and how they deal with scarcity and leisure—it was how I first got into economics as a discipline (I read Mankiw’s textbook to give myself a crash course in economics). For me, English literature was a chance to explore almost anything I wanted and have some of the smartest people in Ottawa correct my mistakes in judgement and style.
Also, it taught me to read quickly and process complex thoughts. There’s no other way I could have made it through Mankiw’s textbook in 3 days.
Skilled trades may not be a good bet for a young person starting off for much longer, even in AB. Most require apprenticeships to get started, but what I’m hearing is that firms in AB are figuring out that they can refuse to train apprentices, claim a labour shortage, and get temporary foreign workers in to do the work for much less, and without a union. That effectively shuts the door on kids wanting to get into trades.
Engineering, at least in Ontario, already figured out that model 10 years ago. It destroyed the market for new grads. It also set up a vicious immigrant/Canadian born cleavage in Engineering that is just nasty to see and experience.
I have yet to figure out a way to argue against using the immigration system as a tool of labour arbitrage without coming over as completely racist.
But who believes business, which is simply another form of bureaucracy, is intelligent anyway? I have proof I lost a government job which I would have loved to do, the duties were just what I liked, due to a website update.
Reading this post and the subsequent discussion, it seems that the root problem is that Canadian universities are not serving their students very well. What would it take for business schools/depts to expand and accept a higher fraction of students? Also, you could have an econ major/biz minor, where the econ side would have a higher focus on courses which are relevant to how real-world businesses are run. Think labor econ, industrial organization, corporate finance etc. Accounting could be analyzed from a law-and-economics perspective – IIRC, David Friedman has some writings on this.
Anon: “Also, you could have an econ major/biz minor, where the econ side would have a higher focus on courses which are relevant to how real-world businesses are run. Think labor econ, industrial organization, corporate finance etc. Accounting could be analyzed from a law-and-economics perspective – IIRC, David Friedman has some writings on this.”
Business schools generally offer the option of a minor in business – here’s Carleton’s. Notice that it has a minimum GPA requirement of 7 on a 12 point scale, which works out to a B-. It’s not available to the students I’m concerned about – the ones who are struggling to get through their degree programs.
Anon: “What would it take for business schools/depts to expand and accept a higher fraction of students?”
It would probably take a diversion of resources away from the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences, who aren’t likely to be amused by the prospect. Moreover, while I think that business schools do over some tangible skills, I can’t discount the likelythat to some extent it performs the sort of signalling role that used to be performed by a BA i.e., if business schools are selective about who they admit, than a business degree still serves as a useful indicator of inate ability. That value disappears if they admit everyone and their dog (just as the value of a BA as a signalling mechanism has been degraded as university enrolment swelled).
Patrick: “I don’t know much about business grad prospects, but engineering is not exactly a road to interesting, well paid work.”
Is there ever such a road?
Nick Rowe asks: “Is it correct that in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Canada (maybe the US too?) business was the easy program to get into? That it only became fashionable in the late 1970’s/80’s?”
Yep. As late as the early 1980s (when I was teaching at Illinois State University), the intro economics courses were required for business majors partly on the rationale that we would flunk out the poorer students for them…business courses were regarded as intrinsically easier than econ courses.
I will also note that my undergraduate econ courses (at a small, fairly selective liberal arts college) had more extensive reading lists than anything I have attempted in a long, long time. It’s apparent (from some evidence from experiments with e-textbooks) that many intro econ students rarely even read the assigned textbooks, or other assigned readings. (And, if you look at some of the MOOcs–massive, open online courses–you will find that many of them, and not just in economics have no assigned, or even suggested, readings…which scares me.)
I should also note that many of my students for the past 25 years have been employed full-time. Many of them have told me that they see no reason to worry about how clearly (or correctly) they write, because their bosses wouldn’t recognize good writing if they saw it. And not a small number of my students have told me that the standards for good writing were higher in the economics (and business) courses they took than in their first-year composition courses or in the (required of business students) course in business and professional writing. All of which also scares me.
Patrick:
Huh? Is engineering really so different in Canada vs the USA? All the engineering students I knew seemed to like their work, and as someone from a similar major (compsci) I feel the same way.
“if I’ve got a student who’s a journalism major, and a student who is struggling to get by as an ESL student, how do I evaluate the two in terms of their technical writing?”
As somebody who teaches English for academic purposes, I’d say, “you hold them to the same standard.” You design a grading rubric that is focused mainly on the content, but under which a student cannot get a great mark without great writing. A student who clearly understands the ideas but drops the odd article and plural -s here or there without causing too much confusion should get a very good grade too. A student who can’t write to be understood should get a failing grade on an assignment that requires them to write to be understood.
Most courses will include a variety of assessment types, and it’s up to the professor to decide what percentage of the grade is based on writing, what on speaking, on drawing diagrams, on doing math, etc.