Broadening perceptions of economics in a new introductory economics sequence

Abstract

The article’s authors report on a comprehensive curricular reform aimed at communicating the broad range of social issues that economists study while engaging students in active learning strategies. The reform increased interest in taking additional economics courses and majoring in economics, broadened students’ views of what economists do, and imparted more content to students. Female students earn higher grades under the revised curriculum, but no differential impact on interest in majoring in economics for female students, students of color, or first generation college students is found. Engaging students with empirical work on important social issues appeals to all students, resulting in more majors from both under- and overrepresented groups, but generates little impact on the percentage of students majoring in economics from underrepresented groups.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• data analysis
• female students
• underrepresented students

JEL CODE:

• A2

Acknowledgments

The authors dedicate this work to Julio Videras, a valued colleague and early contributor to this project who passed away in early 2020. They are grateful to Kristen Friedel and Monica Inzer for sharing institutional data and to Jessica Holmes, Stephen Wu, and two anonymous referees for providing valuable comments.

Conflict of interest

The data used in this article are confidential, student-level data and not publicly available. There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Notes

1 See, for example, Porter and Serra (2020), Allgood et al. (2019), Avilova and Goldin (2018), Li (2018), or Bayer (2011).

2 A sample syllabus is available from the authors upon request.

3 The curricular redesign also expanded topics in the econometrics course students take later in the major. This article focuses only on the evaluation of the change in the introductory sequence.

4 The survey instrument is available upon request.

5 Detailed results are available from the authors upon request.

6 Detailed results are available upon request.

7 One possible explanation is that student athletes are more likely to indicate interest in economics. Recruited athletes are evaluated for admission with slightly different criteria.

8 We also experimented with finer categories of race and a control for international students. We did not obtain statistically significant results in any of our estimations for those variables and report here the more parsimonious specification that places students into White and non-White categories. In addition, we substituted an indicator variable for receipt of financial aid in the first year as an alternative measure of socioeconomic status but did not obtain statistically significant results in any of our estimations with that variable either.

9 The coefficients in column 2 suggest that a one standard deviation increase in cumulative GPA decreases the probability of indicating interest in majoring in economics by five percentage points.

10 The sample size is slightly smaller because not all students who had taken two economics courses at the time of observation were eligible to declare a major.

11 These results and any others not reported in detail are available from the authors upon request.