There is much lunchroom speculation and little reliable information about how many college and university students in the United States take at least one course in economics. To fill this gap, I included several pertinent questions on the American Economic Association's Fall 1998 Universal Academic Questionnaire. The first question asked departments to estimate the proportion of students arriving on their campus as first-year students in fall 1998 who would take at least one course in economics by the time they graduated. The second question asked how many first-year students typically arrive on campus each fall; and the third question asked those institutions that have an ordered economics introductory sequence how many students take the first and second courses in economics during a typical year. Responses from 236 four-year U.S. colleges and universities are shown in Table 1. It appears that 40 percent of the students who matriculated in fall 1998 will take at least one economics course during their college career. Similar percentages are reported in Table 1 for public and private institutions and by the institution's highest degree awarded in economics.Relatively more students take at least one economics course at Ph.D.-granting institutions than at masters or bachelors institutions. The mean exceeds the median, reflecting a higher proportion of students enrolled in at least one economics course at relatively larger colleges and universities. Combining the ratio of first-year students to total enrollments in public and private four-year institutions in 1995 (Digest of Education Statistics 1997) and the projections for year 2000 total higher education enrollments (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1998) yields an estimate of about 1,199,000 firstyear students in 2000. If 39.5 percent of this population were to take at least one economics course, about 474,000 students who matriculated in 2000 eventually would be exposed to formal economics instruction in four-year colleges and universities.