Economics
Teaching the Dismal Science

Universities to revamp economics courses

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Universities to revamp economics courses ©Bloomberg Andy Haldane

Universities across four continents are rolling out a revamped economics curriculum, after students protested that conventional academic courses failed to grapple with the problems befalling the global economy.

Since the financial crisis, student groups have attacked economics departments for failing to deal with the world’s most pressing social issues, including inequality and global warming. They have also criticised professors’ reluctance to teach a range of economic theories, with courses instead focusing on neoclassical models which they claim do little to explain the 2008 meltdown.

The protest has won the backing of prominent economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia University academic, and Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England. Its supporters believe that the exposure to a wider range of approaches is necessary if the next generation of policy makers is to avoid the mistakes made in the run-up to the crisis.

Faculties in London, Paris, New York, Boston, Budapest, Sydney and Bangalore will aim to address these complaints this academic year by road-testing a new syllabus from the CORE project, led by Wendy Carlin, a professor at University College London. The Institute for New Economic Thinking, a research group bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, has spent around $300,000 on the programme so far.

Robert Johnson, INET’s president, said: “There’s a problem that undergraduate courses don’t reflect the research of senior economists. There’s also an issue that the examples that we use in textbooks are often based on US data and institutions and don’t produce much excitement elsewhere, particularly in the emerging economies. We’re trying to address that.”

An interactive online textbook, which those involved say places more emphasis on economic history and data, is already available for free on CORE’s website. Davide Melcangi, a doctoral student at University College London, who has worked on the production of the ebook, said the new course would address students’ concerns the current curriculum was too abstract.

The problem is [CORE] is not really pluralism. It’s very much mainstream and it does not meet what we would like to see, such as more alternative voices or methodologies - Louison Cahen-Fourot, doctoral student at Paris XIII university

“Most undergraduate courses focus on the tools that economists use without addressing the questions most students have about the economy,” Mr Melcangi said. “The motivation of the CORE project is to teach the tools by addressing the questions.”

But, while some students who have campaigned for curriculum reform view the ebook as an improvement, others think CORE says much too little about different approaches to economic problems.

Louison Cahen-Fourot, a doctoral student at Paris XIII university who has also been involved with PEPS, a French group advocating more pluralism in economics, said: “The problem is [CORE] is not really pluralism,” Mr Cahen-Fourot, said. “It’s very much mainstream and it does not meet what we would like to see at PEPS, such as more alternative voices or methodologies. We also would like to see more openness to [methods from] other social sciences,” he said.

Rafe Martyn, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s sensible to do what CORE is trying to do and base teaching in empirics and to bring the content more into line of current research. There’s a fear that CORE just wants to present the theory it thinks is right, but the people involved are diverse and it’s a work in progress.”

The plan is for the ebook to be modified by online crowdsourcing of student and faculty comments, as well as by other economists. The final version is expected at the start of the 2016 academic year.

“There are always going to be trade-offs between how wide-ranging and encompassing you make the syllabus and how broadly it will be adopted by the profession,” Mr Johnson said. “I want to respect the feedback and intelligence of young people. But teachers must also be counted upon to provide legitimate guidance.”

Prof Carlin said the ebook was made available for free to provide “a public good”. She also hoped the book’s design would allow lecturers to focus on improving students’ communication skills. “[The curriculum] frees up face-to-face time in class for discussion. This leaves more time for applications to policy and empirical problems in class,” Prof Carlin said. “In the past weeks, our first users at two US universities have found the medium very attractive.”

Students’ discontent about mainstream economics courses has coalesced around the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics, a collaboration of 65 groups from 30 countries. Last year, one of the groups, the Post-Crash Economics Society at the University of Manchester, devised a module for third-year students that was ultimately rejected by the faculty.

University College London, Sciences Po in Paris, Columbia University in New York, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the Central European University in Budapest, the University of Sydney and Azim Premji University in Bangalore are the institutions involved in the first phase of the project.