To the Editor:
No one would deny that the economics department at Dartmouth is outstanding (some of my good friends are economists!) or that it, like many others in the social sciences, is seriously understaffed, as described in a recent front page article (The Dartmouth, April 7). And certainly economics professor Blanchflower's claim in the article about the pure market value of an economics degree compared to a sociology degree is also largely correct. However, market success (e.g., landing a high-paying job as an investment banker) is only one way to measure value. Though an important measure to be sure, we may not want market success to be our only metric for the value of a Dartmouth degree, especially when we remember that it is market success that explains the current onslaught of reality TV, Pokemon and Britney Spears.
And just for the record, over the past few years the top sociology students have gone on to, for example, Columbia and Georgetown Law Schools, Harvard Medical School, and graduate departments in sociology at Princeton, Berkeley and Cornell.
