Involving Undergraduates in Research To Encourage Them To Undertake Ph.D. Study in Economics

摘要

The number of Ph.D.s granted in economics annually by American universities has fluctuated between 900 and 1,100 since the early 1970s (Ehrenberg, 2004 fig. 1). However, increasingly these Ph.D. degrees are granted to temporary residents of the United States; while temporary residents earned less than 20 percent of the Ph.D.s in economics in 1970 by 2002 they earned over 55 percent (Ehrenberg, 2004 fig. 2). The declining interest of American students in pursuing Ph.D. study in economics is due to a number of factors, including much better earnings opportunities in related fields, such as law and business, and the declining attractiveness of academic careers in economics that has been caused by the declining shares of faculty positions in economics departments that are full-time tenured and tenure-track ones. For example, a survey of economics department chairs undertaken by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) in 2003 found that nationwide the percentage of economics department faculty members at surveyed institutions in full-time tenured and tenure-track positions fell from about 75 percent in 1982-1983 to about 58 percent in 2002-2003 (Ehrenberg, 2004 table 1).