Second in a five-part series looking at various academic departments on campus.
Being ranked seventh in the nation might seem satisfying for other programs, but the Economics Department at Boston University is still looking to improve.
With more than 2,000 students and 33 faculty members, the current state of the Economics Department is hardly lacking. But associate professor Todd Idson, director of undergraduate studies for the Economics Department, said he is still looking to expand.
“We’re trying to hire a number of new people this year,” he said. “We’re taking in two or three new senior faculty and a few junior faculty. So we hope next year there will be quite a number of new faculty.”
Economics Department Chairman Laurence Kotlikoff agreed and stressed the important role faculty members play in the department. He credited them with turning a mediocre department into a top-ranked program.
“We had a meteoric rise in the department over the last 20 years,” he said. “There’s been tremendous support toward improving our department. I would say the Economics Department is one of the great success stories at this university.”
Maintaining a top-notch department means retaining qualified professors and letting weaker professors go stated Kotlikoff.
“There’s really lots of opportunities to learn and we try to weed out the deadwood in terms of the faculty and the teaching – we have a lot of top faculty teaching undergraduate courses,” he said. “We have also reduced dramatically the number of classes taught by graduate students.”
Kotlikoff also said faculty have to work together to be effective.
“Putting together an Economics Department is like putting together a football team,” he said. “You have to fit the individual pieces together so they work as a team.
“We have a lot of high level competition in the market,” he added. “We’re something like the Patriots. There may not be any Nobel Prize winners in our department at the moment but the team put together is a championship enterprise.”
The department is also looking to broaden its horizons by offering new student-oriented programs.
“This year we got active again in the Undergraduate Economics Association. It’s a pretty vibrant undergraduate program,” Idson said. “They run things like brown-bag informative luncheon chats with the faculty.”
The program is also looking to go beyond its 28 undergraduate courses and begin to offer concentrations in other schools, Idson said.
“We’re also working on setting up some inter-disciplinary majors with other departments,” he said. “The first one will be with the journalism school. They have a master’s degree program in economic and business journalism, but there is nothing on the undergraduate level. We are working together to develop a proposal for an undergraduate concentration of economics in journalism.”
The department is one of the most multicultural on campus, with two-thirds of the graduate students and one-third of the faculty from outside the United States, according to the department website.
CAS senior and economics major Dan Rosenberg feels the international flavor of the department is something he would not get outside of it.
“It has a very strong international influence,” he said. “There are students from all over the world.”
While faculty research has helped the program become one of the best in the nation, Rosenberg said he wishes professors had more time to help their students.
“They’re very friendly but they do a lot of research on their own,” Rosenberg said. “They make sure their time is their time. I’d say they aren’t the most accessible.”