Editorial: Changing economics

Of all the departments at the University, the economics department has probably undergone the most dramatic change over the past couple semesters and will continue to undergo significant change in the future. Under the leadership of its new chair Thomas Nechyba, the department will seek to redress still-existing problems with its graduate program. Fortunately, the department seems to be heading in the right direction and Nechyba is the right man to implement the needed changes.

One of the big challenges facing the economics department is the high rate of attrition in its graduate program, out of which 40 percent of the students drop after failing their first year pre-qualifying exams. Obviously, the department must address this tremendous failure rate among its graduate students, which is an expensive waste of University resources since the University provides financial support for graduate students and must dedicate resources to teaching these graduate students as well.

There are several ways the department can address this problem. The most direct is simply to admit students who will be better able to pass these exams. Although it is surely difficult to judge one's ability as an economics graduate student from an undergraduate GPA, standardized test scores and the like, with a pool of several hundred applicants Duke should be able to pick out two dozen people who are able to pass the tests and complete the program. If the current methods of selecting students do not allow the economics department to figure out who those people are, then it needs to develop new methods of figuring out which students are the best.

Another way to help economic graduate students through the program is to improve the structures for mentoring within the department. Unfortunately, the department currently lacks a critical mass of mid-level faculty, who are the faculty most willing and able to properly advise graduate students and who are performing research in which graduate students can easily take place. Younger professors are too focused on publishing to get tenure and older professors are often less interested in graduate students and are doing more work with their peers in the field, making mid-level faculty essential for the mentoring and development of graduate students. Fortunately, the economics department has been authorized to make four mid-level hires, which will help to fill in these holes in the department.

Past changes in the economics department to consolidate the core mico and macroeconomics sequence into large lecture classes has freed up a great amount of both professorial and graduate student time, which can only be a positive thing for the retention of graduate students and gives everyone more time to spend in higher level courses and on research.