• Amy Laskowski

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    Photo of Amy Laskowski. A white woman with long brown hair pulled into a half up, half down style and wearing a burgundy top, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Amy Laskowski is a senior writer at Boston University. She is always hunting for interesting, quirky stories around BU and helps manage and edit the work of BU Today’s interns. She did her undergrad at Syracuse University and earned a master’s in journalism at the College of Communication in 2015. Profile

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There are 9 comments on CAS Economics Department Ranked 12th Nationally

  1. No offense to the BU econ department, but the departments at the top of this list are all neoliberal, and are known to propound such economic “solutions” as water privatization and wage slavery. They have contributed to a cult of ideology that favors the very, very rich. Again, I’m sure the BU econ dept. is top notch, but by what criteria? If you look at that list, only one heterodox program nationally breaks the top 30: Michigan State. The rest are at the bottom. New School is 119! And UMass Amherst, literally a world-renowned heterodox institution with students coming from all over the world to study their political economy courses and Marxian economics, isn’t even on the list.

    1. The rankings are based on how many papers are published out of a department and how many times those papers are cited by other authors. This is only one way to rank institutions, but it does not contain any valuation of the content taught in the classroom or the demographics of the student body. The heterodox schools don’t rank well simply because the papers that come out of these institutions are not as highly cited, theres no subjective value judgement here, just data.

      The fact that this is simply one ranking of many is addressed in the quote that reminds us “not to overstate the significance or meaning of any one ranking”. But I do think it speaks to the quality of the faculty in the department.

      1. Going further, though, the rankings speak much more to dominant economic theory throughout the West and its allies and client states (to use the same term as anonymous, neoliberalism).

  2. @anonymous Not so sure I’d label Harvard or MIT as “neoliberal.” Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs—two highly popular economists and graduates of MIT and Harvard, respectively—are often referred to as New Keynesians, hardly what one would categorize as neoliberal, quite the opposite in fact.

    1. A good point. In alphabetical order, the four are Larry Epstein, Robert King, Larry Kotlikoff, and Pierre Perron. All are actually in something like the top 0.5 percent.

  3. […] CAS Economics Department Ranked 12th Nationally “This data is used to rank both individual economists and economics departments,” he says. “We have a number of very highly ranked economists—people who write a lot of important, prominent, highly cited papers—so we end up high in the rankings. Read more on BU Today […]

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