What Students Remember and Say about College Economics Years Later

Abstract

In his presidential address to the American Economic Association, George Stigler (1963) offered the provocative hypothesis that students would retain very little knowledge from principles courses in economics five years or more after taking the courses. The few empirical studies that have been published on this topic generally found no or small lasting effects, at least for those who took fewer than four courses (see e.g., G. L. Bach and Phillip Saunders, 1965; Gerald J. Lynch, 1990). That raises even broader questions about the long-term effects of studying economics in college, in terms of individuals’ behavior as consumers, workers, and voters, which we are now beginning to investigate using both survey and transcript data. We have two major goals in this study. First, we want to learn how students perceive their classroom experience in economics courses years after leaving school, both in absolute terms and compared to other courses they took. We drew samples of economics, business, and other majors, who attended our four universities in 1976, 1986, and 1996, and asked which topics regularly covered in economics courses they now viewed as being most (and least) important. We asked whether they now viewed the economics courses they took as interesting, important, too difficult, or too abstract. We also compared their perceptions of teaching methods and grading rigor in economics courses to those developed in other courses. Our second major goal represents an empirical test of the common claim that economics is a unique “way of thinking.” If it is, we might reasonably expect people with more training in economics to have different views on policy issues, and to make different decisions as consumers, workers, savers, investors, and voters. We collected survey data on many of these choices, and by matching those responses with transcript data, we plan to investigate whether there are observable behavioral responses associated with being an economics major, or simply taking some minimum number of economics courses, compared to students who took fewer courses or none at all. There are other uses for these data. They can likely be used to study choice of major and course-taking behavior as well as common laboreconomics issues such as human capital versus screening in the labor market. Certainly the data can provide insight into curriculum development for economics departments, and business schools as well. There is, obviously, the potential for response biases in the analysis of these data, but we expect that having transcript data for respondents and nonrespondents will allow us to deal with these issues econometrically. This first, brief report from this ongoing project addresses only the first goal of the project, specifically, how our former students evaluate their experience with economics courses and instructors. What economic courses and concepts do they now believe are most important? Do they wish they had taken more, or less, coursework in economics? What do they think now about various economic issues? And * Allgood: Department of Economics, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588 (e-mail: sallgood@unlnotes.unl. edu); Bosshardt: Department of Economics, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, 33431 (e-mail: wbosshar@fau.edu); van der Klaauw: Department of Economics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599 (e-mail: vanderkl@email.unc.edu); Watts: Department of Economics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, and while this paper was written, the German International School of Management and Administration, Hanover, Germany (e-mail: mwatts@mgmt.purdue.edu). We thank the Board of the Calvin K. Kazanjian Economics Foundation for the grant that made this work possible, and the AEA Committee for Economic Education for bringing us together to write the proposal, as described in Michael Salemi et al. (2002). Mike Salemi provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. April Fidler provided major assistance in project coordination, administration, and data entry. Georg Schaur worked extensively with data organization and preliminary tabulations.