Economics Is the 'Just Right' Liberal-Arts Major

Like many liberal-arts institutions, Middlebury College, where the author teaches, has a problem: Too many students want to be economics majors. Economics enrollments keep growing, and adding more faculty members to the department seems to only increase the demand. Professors at other liberal-arts colleges confirm that the phenomenon is widespread and has been for some time. The author advocates that economics has become a "just right" major that provides the appropriate middle ground of skill preparation, analytic rigor, and intellectual excitement that students look for in a major, and that employers look for when hiring students. Economics has so many majors, he says, because it is doing something right. Rather than trying to reduce the number of economics majors, as the author has been asked by the dean of a college that refuses to keep increasing the number of economics faculty members, he suggests that a successful department should be rewarded rather than changed, and that other departments should be encouraged to follow the example pf becoming "just right," too.