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This is just a short note regarding Bruce Caldwell's comments about British students who
major in economics. I comment from the advantage of having taught economics at a British
university from 1990 to 2000. First, about 25-30% of 18-year olds go to some form of
further/ higher education--about the same as in the US. Hence the range of academic
prepareness among the students is just as great as in the US. The university I taught at
(De Montfort University)is about the same tier as a California State university, a
University of Missouri-Kansas City, or a private university such as Roosevelt University.
The students coming into our economics course of study may have taken economics at their
A-levels (roughly equivalent to the final 2-years of high school but a bit more
specialized) but again they might not have. In any case, the economics they came in with
was so poor that we as a department taught the students as if they did not have any
economics. Consequently, we used Begg, Dornbush, and Fisher and other introductory texts
just as in the US. In the second year we used regular intermediate economic texts just
like in the US. If you try to do something a bit more higher level like use calculus or
have the students read the first 50 pages of Value and Capital the students revolt, just
like they do here in the equivalent institutions. The students took a few more classes in
economics than US students, but because they may only meet 2 hours a week in class and
classes only run 12 weeks or 24 weeks in the current set up and students have only 3 years
of university (excluding Scotland and maybe Northern Ireland) they end up spending about
as much time in class as American students. As for applied course, my department offered
some but no more than US departments; and the emphasis on neoclassical theory in terms of
say mathematical economics or just using more formal/mathematical approaches in class
instruction was not really significantly different from that found in the classroom of
equivalent US universities and colleges. The only real difference is a historical
accident. When De Monfort (as Leicester Polytechnic) was regulated by the Council of
Academic Awards (prior to circa 1993), the economic advisors to the CNAA (one being
Bernard Corry from Queens Mary College) required at all polytechnic economic courses to
expose their students to heterodox economic theories--and not just in a history of thought
course. Hence you had some interesting classes being offered--such as Sraffian theory,
Marxian theory, Post Keynesian theory and others. But as the Americanization of British
higher education takes hold combined with the dominance of neoclassical orthodoxy by a
variety of means such as the Research Assessment Exercise and national guidelines for the
teaching of economics at universities (which defines economics in terms of scarce
resources and choices among competing ends) this heterodoxy in the polytechnics is dying
out, expect perhaps at Manchester Met. University. (It should be noted that pluralism in
the courses at the older universities has been nearly non-existence since at least the
early 1980s if not before--although I might have exaggerated a little here.) In any case,
students in the UK at these institutions are getting the same kind of non-pluralistic
economics as they get in the US and the same amount of formalism etc.
Of course, the students who attend Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol and the other older
and ancient universities have a better academic background and many have to come in with
knowledge of calculus or more. But is this really any different than students entering
Harvard, Berkeley, etc.? And from my inspection of the classes offered in these programs,
the students get about the same thing as American students at equivalent institutions (and
with nearly no exposure to heterodox economic theory). You have to remember that many of
the people teaching in these programs have obtained their advanced degrees from American
universities whose economics departments were dominated by neoclassical economists.
Thus, the PAE revolt has emerged because students in the UK (Cambridge), France, and the
US/Canada face the same kind of economic instruction and they are reacting similarly to
it. The issue about political views that Professor Caldwell raised is a red-herring. The
students object to the narrow-minded, non-pluralistic instruction they receive in
economics. To agree to their demands would mean opening the teaching and discourse in
economics to alternative views etc. But this would mean that students could opt for
different theories. But letting students chose their theories after careful study and
consideration is not an option that mainstream economists want them to have. So it is not
about politics but open-mindedness and theory choice which is at the heart of the PAE
revolt.
Fred Lee
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