The number of undergraduate economics degrees awarded by colleges and universities in the United States was virtually stagnant from 2009–10 through 2012–13. In 2013–14, undergraduate economics degrees began to accelerate, rising about 6.9 percent in just one year, followed by a slightly larger rise in degrees in 2014–15, totaling almost 15 percent over the two years. In 2015–16, however, growth fell back to near a 2 percent increase.Overall, the number of economics graduates across the 293 universities included in Siegfried's survey has grown over 37 percent between the 2006-07 and 2015-16 academic years. There has been a similar increase over recent years in the U.K. It makes me wonder why Australia and New Zealand should be going so against the trend. Perhaps, as I noted in that earlier post, we really need to be looking closely at what is taught in high schools and reconsider allowing such a dominance of business studies.
One thing appears unfortunately similar across all countries though, and that's the gender gap (which I have covered before, here and here and here). In Siegfried's data, the 2015-16 academic year had the highest proportion of female economics graduates (from the surveyed universities) at 34.0%, up from 31.0% in 2006-07, but not terribly different from the 33.8% in 2001-02. There's still a long way to go to achieve parity.
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