If it seems like all your friends are economics majors, you're not alone. Economics has increasingly become major of choice at Dartmouth over the past 10 years -- culminating with approximately 180 majors in the class of 2004 alone. The increase has been so drastic that the economics department is having trouble accommodating the vast numbers of students eager to tackle macroeconomics.
Huge classes, long waitlists and a high faculty to student ratio over the past few years has made an already academically challenging major an even more difficult degree to attain. Econ 21, a required course for an economics major or minor track, had a waitlist of 45 people this term.
The College's student-faculty ratio is 8:1, but the current ratio in the economics department is approximately 35:1. The department has 14 full-time faculty and is struggling to find the time and manpower to accommodate the students who want to take classes. The current enrollment numbers suggest that approximately 20 percent of the graduating class of 2005 will be economics majors -- yet the department has only 5 percent of the faculty.
According to Michael Mastanduno, associate dean for social sciences and a government professor, decisions about the allocation of resources to various departments are not made lightly.
Mastanduno acknowledged, though, that "if econ has moved into a position where enrollment is increasing beyond the ability of the faculty can't keep up, we need to address that."
This year, Economics 40, a major course, is limited to senior majors so these students can complete their graduation requirements. The administration also added additional sections to some courses this spring to accommodate students.
A temporary solution in the past has been to hire visiting professors to supplement department staff. Visiting professors currently teach more than 50 percent of econ classes. But this short-term solution extracts a price. Visiting professors generally teach only a term or two, so students do not know them as well as full-time faculty. And since they are not Dartmouth faculty, they cannot help with many administrative aspects of teaching, such as signing major cards.
"It is healthy to have visiting professors, but we should not look to them as a solution to an enduring enrollment problem," Mastanduno said.
The enrollment numbers for econ have been increasing for a decade, but the department still employs approximately the same number of full-time faculty as it did 10 years ago. There were 20 faculty members in the econ department in 1995 and 21 in 2003. This year, the econ department made two offers to potential candidates -- but did not hire either.
"The need for more econ professors has been a long term trend. I don't fault the administration for moving slowly, but it is getting to the point where we have to do something," Douglas Irwin, head of the Economics Department said. "I wish we could have hired one or two people this year, but there's always next year. It's a year-to-year thing,"
Hiring economics professors in today's market is not an easy task. In addition to the time and energy required to find suitable candidates for hire, similar situations in economics departments at other schools make professors a valuable commodity, and, therefore, expensive. Furthermore, it would be a year at the earliest before any new additions to the economics staff would have a significant effect on the numbers crunch, according to economics professor David Blanchflower.
"We can't just go out and hire professors tomorrow. It would require a big effort on the part of the administration, and would need to be a systematic and investigative process to find the right people to hire," Blanchflower said. "This situation is a result of benign neglect. We should have planned and predicted and been ready for this."
Most students seemed unaware of the extent of current deficit in the department, but many have first-hand experience with the fallout. Andrew Chen, a junior major, called arranging his schedule around when econ classes are held "a hassle."
"They don't offer all classes all terms, and a lot of the classes need to be taken in sequential order, so it's hard to know which ones to take," Chen said.
The need for more economics professors to meet growing demand is not a problem limited to Dartmouth, according to Blanchflower, "Everyone in the Ivy League is rushing to do econ. The rate of return on a Dartmouth econ degree is very high," he said. "You can be the best sociology student at Dartmouth, or the 45th best econ student -- which degree gives you the most value for your tuition?"
Irwin and others also cited the quality of the department as the catalyst for the high enrollments.
"This is the biggest success story going," said Blanchflower. "We're doing a great job and students like what we're doing. This is a good problem to have. But the administration is going to have to make a decision. Double the number of faculty or halve the number of students. Or else we're going to have to say to people you can't be an econ major -- we can't teach you."
