Models of undergraduate research in economics: Advice from eight exemplary programs

Abstract

A productive research experience can be the highpoint of the undergraduate curriculum for an economics major, allowing the student to employ the tools economists use in richer and more complex ways. In our 2016 poll of economics departments at the top 30 liberal arts colleges and the top 30 national universities (based on U.S. News and World Report 2017 rankings), we find that almost all departments provide an undergraduate research experience in some form because their faculty share a belief that research is integral to the field of economics and vital to the development of a well-rounded economics major (Hoyt and McGoldrick 2017). Students have the opportunity to hypothesize, analyze, interpret, and create using the tools of economists while also developing general skills such as writing, presenting, managing time, and working with others. There is consensus among the top programs queried: resources invested into a well-designed undergraduate research program can lead to human capital accumulation that is valued by graduate programs and employers alike. In our study of the top programs, we gathered information regarding what motivates programs to include a research component, how prevalent undergraduate research is and the forms it takes, what departments view as obstacles to undergraduate research, the creative ways that departments foster research in light of resource constraints, and the steps departments take to create a culture of research. While our departmental survey yielded many interesting methods of promoting undergraduate research, we chose a select few to describe their experience and provide a more in-depth perspective. To that end, this symposium includes articles written by faculty at two leading liberal arts colleges, Macalester College and Wellesley College, as well as three top national universities including the University of Chicago, Dartmouth University, and Princeton University. Our choice of those programs to include in this symposium in no way suggests that the other programs could not have contributed similarly. Additionally, in May of 2015, economists from three institutions with outstanding undergraduate economics programs participated in a panel discussion at the American Economic Association's Conference on Teaching and Research on Economic Education that focused on partnerships with other units on campus to facilitate undergraduate economic research and writing. The final article in this symposium is authored by economists and representatives from these other campus units at the University of California at Berkeley, Barnard College, and Carleton College. We also refer readers to a 2015 symposium in the Journal of Economic Education that was assembled to allow a response to Stock and Siegfried (2015), who documented the undergraduate origins of PhD economists. Four "top producing" programs contributed to that collection, and each piece includes a brief description of the role undergraduate research plays in the success of the undergraduate programs in these departments (

Data literacy in economic development

“…Students do not need competency with spreadsheet programs on entering the course, but the instructor will need to dedicate some class time to introducing basic spreadsheet functions such as IF(), COUNT() or SUM(). The practice of the course is similar to that used in higher-level courses where experiential learning (also known as learning-by-doing and hands-on learning) is used in capstone courses to teach economics research skills at the best-ranked liberal arts college and university economics departments in the United States (Hoyt and McGoldrick [2017] summarize these ideas and introduce a variety of case studies examining the practices more closely, such as Brunnermeier [2017] and Lima and Tsiang [2017]; with similar practices proposed in Ball and Medeiros [2012]). I begin by outlining the main measures that are taught in an economic development classroom-income, poverty and inequality-and explain related theory and history from which these aggregate measures emerge.…”