Trends in Undergraduate Economics Degrees: An Update

Abstract

The number of undergraduate economics degrees awarded in the United States declined by almost 20 percent from academic year 1991-92 to 1993-94 (Siegfried 1995). This precipitous decline is not unprecedented, however (Margo and Siegfried 1996). The number of undergraduate degrees has fallen by similar amounts two other times since World War II. The sharp decline in the number of economics majors in the 1990s is of concern to many academic economists. At many institutions, the number of faculty in a department depends on enrollments. Furthermore, declining enrollments have coincided with a relatively soft market for new Ph.D. economists that seems to have already slowed the rate of increase in starting salaries. Thus, in November and December of 1996, I replicated my earlier surveys of the number of undergraduate economics degrees awarded by American colleges and universities, adding the two latest years available, 1994-95 and 1995-96. The methodology and definitions are consistent with the two previous surveys (Siegfried 1995; Siegfried and Scott 1994) and are not repeated here. The new survey results are presented in Table 1. The number of degrees is reported for the same 172 institutions for each year. Of the 199 institutions in the 1993-94 survey, 162 updated their data and are included again. An additional 10 new institutions have been added to the sample to mitigate the effects of attrition.' As a result of the change in identity of some sample institutions, and because of some corrections made to prior years' data, the measured decline in degrees from 1991-92 to 1993-94 was only 17.2 percent, in contrast to the 19.8 percent reported two years ago (Siegfried 1995).2 The number of economics degrees awarded continued to decline in 1994-95 and 1995-96. The drop of about 9 percent in 1994-95 was about the same as the percentage declines in 1993-94 and in 1992-93. In 1995-96, however, the decline showed signs of moderating, slowing to about 2 percent. Over the four-year period of decline, from 1991-92 to 1995-96, the annual number of undergraduate economics degrees earned in the United States has fallen almost 27 percent. Adding the two latest years to the survey data reveals diverging trends between public and private institutions. Most of the loss in economics majors since 1993-94 has been at public universities. Undergraduate economics degrees awarded by private colleges and universities fell by less than 3 percent over the two years between