Why you should send your budding young economist to Harvard

The first year of graduate-level economics can be a rough experience, a wake-up call after four years of production possibility frontiers and utility curves. And now, stressed-out Ph.D. students have a new reason to tear their hair out: Not only does their first-year performance strongly predict whether they’ll complete their Ph.D., but first-year microeconomics, macroeconomics ...

The first year of graduate-level economics can be a rough experience, a wake-up call after four years of production possibility frontiers and utility curves. And now, stressed-out Ph.D. students have a new reason to tear their hair out: Not only does their first-year performance strongly predict whether they'll complete their Ph.D., but first-year microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics grades are also statistically significant predictors of job placement, according to new research by a team of top economics professors that includes Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame.

The first year of graduate-level economics can be a rough experience, a wake-up call after four years of production possibility frontiers and utility curves. And now, stressed-out Ph.D. students have a new reason to tear their hair out: Not only does their first-year performance strongly predict whether they’ll complete their Ph.D., but first-year microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics grades are also statistically significant predictors of job placement, according to new research by a team of top economics professors that includes Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame.

The results of the study, published in the latest issue of the American Economic Review, also show that Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores, foreign citizenship, sex, and having a prior master’s degree do not predict job placement. Interestingly, though, students who attend a foreign undergraduate institution perform “significantly better” in micro, macro and ‘metrics, but on average, this doesn’t give them much of a leg up on the job market. That’s because the researchers also found, unsurprisingly, that “students who attended elite undergraduate universities and liberal arts colleges are more likely to be placed in top-ranked academic jobs.”

This holds even though those students “do not perform significantly differently from other students.”

Prerna Mankad is a researcher at Foreign Policy.

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