----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]