Following the passing of the Structural and Social Institutional Hierarchies (SSIH) requirement, the Economics Department decided to reexamine the requirements for obtaining a concentration in the department. The department is now proposing changes to the introductory economics sequence. These proposed changes were recently approved by the Committee on Academic Policy; these changes reflect the department’s shifting priorities.
The current introductory sequence is: one semester of Issues in Economics 101, Microeconomics, and one semester of Economics 102, Issues in Macroeconomics. This sequence will be replaced with a one semester introductory course combining the principles of microeconomics and macroeconomics.
The second course in the introductory sequence will be Economics 166, Economic Theory and Evidence. The new course will teach students statistical methods and how to complete labs which allow them to explore the connections between social categories and social and economic impacts.
The department’s proposal lists sample topics including “environmental justice, the inflation/unemployment tradeoff for people in different social categories, the impact of fiscal and monetary policy on individuals in various social categories, and the impact of international trade on inequality.” Students in this course will use statistical software including Microsoft Excel and Stata for data analysis.
The changes in introductory courses will also shift other courses in the department. Economics 265, Statistics will be replaced with Introduction to Economics 266, Econometrics, which will cover more advanced material as some of the previous materials in 265 will now be covered in 166. Additionally, the enrollment cap in Economics 275 and 285, Introduction to Microeconomic Theory and Introduction to Macroeconomic Theory, will be reduced from forty to twenty-seven because they will be more in-depth courses. Since the introduction sequence is now only one semester, some of the material will be added to 275 and 285, so more class discussions and presentations will be included to further explore the material.
Professor Elizabeth Jensen of the Economics Department described the benefits of the changes, stating that she and the department “see two important benefits of the new introductory sequence.” The first of these benefits, according to Jensen, is that “students will be introduced earlier in the major to the research methods used by economists.” The second major benefit of the new changes to the economics introductory sequence, says Jensen, is that “students will have a chance to apply those methods to investigate how economists incorporate race, class, gender, and ethnicity into economic models and seek evidence for differential outcomes based on these social categories.”
This new sequence was designed by the Economics faculty to provide a strong introduction to the department for both concentrators and non-concentrators.
