Academic Learning Compact - Economics, Liberal Arts and Sciences

This major teaches you the skills used to understand how households, firms and governments make economic decisions and the implications of those decisions for resource allocation, pricing, the distribution of income and macroeconomic variables.

Additional information is available from your major's website.

Before Graduating You Must

• Take the Economics Field Test conducted by the ETS. This test will be 10% of your grade in ECO 3203.The goal of the Department of Economics is that our students' average score exceed the national average of 154. However, a score of 154 is not a graduation requirement.
• Students who want to graduate magna cum laude or summa cum laude must propose and defend an honors thesis before the department’s undergraduate committee.
• Complete requirements for the baccalaureate degree, as determined by faculty.

Skills You Will Acquire in the Major (SLOs)

1. Understand the implications of utility maximization for the behavior and choices of households and understand how households respond to incentives.
2. Understand the implications of profit maximization for the behavior and choices of firms in the short run, the long run and a variety of market structures.
3. Understand the meaning and implications of economic efficiency.
4. Understand how the implications of decisions made by households, firms, the government and the foreign sector affect a country's macroeconomic variables like output, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates and the trade balance.
5. Understand how economists use statistics to learn about economic behavior.
6. Critically evaluate and compare alternative policies using complex criteria.
7. Interpret, understand and communicate quantitative concepts.
8. Articulate ideas clearly and effectively in speech and in writing, in an accepted manner of presentation.

* Economics electives: ECO 3532, ECO 3704, ECO 3713, ECO 4400, ECO 4504, ECO 4730, ECO 4934, ECO 4935, ECP 3006, ECP 3113, ECP 3203, ECP 3302, ECP 3409, ECP 3530, ECO 4213, ECP 4330, ECP 4403, ECP 4451, ECS 3403, ECS 4013 and ECS 4203.