Mission Statement

The Department of Economics will provide excellence in economic literacy,  excellent support of General Education in its principles level courses,  excellent major programs, an excellent Master of Arts program, and an environment for substantial and meaningful research.

Excellence in Economic Literacy

By excellence in economic literacy we mean that we will pursue a particular  set of skills and concepts that are central to a person being literate in  economic principles. These economic concepts and skills include

• opportunity  cost,
• mutual gains from voluntary trade,
• marginal analysis,
• equilibrium,
• market efficiency, and
• market failure.

A student who is economically literate has the ability to:

1. identify trade-offs in the context of constraints;
2. use  chains of deductive reasoning in conjunction with simple models to help understand phenomena; and
3. use creative skills to determine how to frame  questions and how to choose the tools and principles to apply to particular problems.

We will assess these skills by examination in the principles and intermediate theory courses.

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Excellence in General Education

Excellence in General Education includes

• writing,
• problem solving,
• moral  reasoning, and
• critical thinking.

The general education skills will be addressed by individual faculty in the context of economic concepts. Not every professor  will advance every skill. Assessment of these skills will be undertaken by the  Department.

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Excellence in Major Programs

For excellence in our majors, we are looking for mastery of core economic  concepts and the ability to apply and use these concepts. The core concepts are developed in the principles and intermediate theory courses and provide the  bedrock upon which the discipline rests. We will assess the progress of our majors in their knowledge of economics by examining their performance in the intermediate theory courses. Performance in these courses is an important  measurement of the student's understanding of economics. Excellence in our major programs will also be indicated by the jobs and graduate schools our students  pass into.

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Excellence in Master of Arts

The Master of Arts will provide excellent education in both advanced micro and macro theory and the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of public  policy. Excellence in the Master of Arts will be measured by the quality of  performance on the comprehensives and in the oral examinations. In addition, the quality of the MA will be evaluated by the quality of the Ph.D. programs that  our students are admitted to and by the kinds of jobs they are offered.

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Substantial and Meaningful Research Environment

Progress toward this goal will be measured by the quality and quantity of  research output published by the Department. While variations year by year will  be a fact, our goal is to achieve graduate faculty status for all faculty and a  generally high level of output by a significant portion of the faculty over  their careers.

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