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One problem is that economists are prone to recommending other undergraduate majors to students because we're the ones who think about human capital development and optimal decision making.
If you're stopping at a bachelors degree, then econ probably isn't the best choice. Also, if you want to go to grad school in econ, an undergraduate degree in econ probably isn't the best choice. Womp womp.
Econ curricula at top universities tend to be pretty mathematically rigorous including heavy math, stat, and computer requirements
Maybe that's another explanation? The Econ profs got too ahead of their skis in terms of the technical requirements and forgot that most of the students aren't interested in that, and if they were they wouldn't be majoring in Econ.
The obvious answer is to just make econ a graduation requirement.
Heh, I sit on a university wide curriculum committee and the biggest fights are exactly over which courses all undergrads are gonna be required to take. You can imagine why
I don't have to imagine. I've been involved in those discussions as well.
It's a hot topic of discussion in my department. We've seen enrollment numbers tanking for the major but no one is exactly sure why.
My personal hypothesis is that the popularization of data science and business analytics as separate fields is eating at some of the previous population of students interested in econ
It's also a bit of a stale field at the frontier, if I'm being honest. At this point I'm pretty much only still in it because the switching costs are too high