More Popular Than Dismal

There was standing room only at Harvard's Lowell Lecture Hall as more than 1,200 eager students crowded in for the opening of one of the hottest courses on campus. Human Sexuality 101? Analytical Communal Living 202? Mysticism 303? Hardly. It was Economics 10, the standard survey course for beginners. Enrollment in the course is up 43% from last fall, and nearly one in every five Harvard undergrads is taking it. The Harvard campus is not alone. At Columbia and Barnard, at Atlanta's black Morehouse College and the patrician University of Virginia, at universities all across the U.S., that once-dismal mainstay economics is suddenly the course to take.

Why? Answers Elisabeth Allison, who is "head section person" (teacher) for Harvard's EC 10: "When the economy is in bad shape, people are interested--and, boy, are they ever interested!" At the University of California at Berkeley, where enrollment in undergraduate economics courses is up 15% to 20%, Professor Albert Fishlow offers a similar explanation: "Food price increases have brought home to everyone the need to understand inflation." Smith College is another school trying to make economics understandable. The result: This year, one in every two Smithies is or has been enrolled in the basic course.

Some professors give still another reason for the boom. Dr. Charles Howe of the University of Colorado says that students are more and more interested in taking courses that prepare them for a job. While graduate economics courses in natural-resources management and public finance have risen in popularity, enrollment in Colorado's basic course in economic principles has almost doubled since last year, to 1,400 students.

The trend may be part of a general shift away from the "soft," theoretical, social sciences of the heady '60s, especially sociology and anthropology, and back to the "hard" disciplines. The economics courses not only provide basic preparation for many careers, but also can be specifically applied (professors willing) to the nation's fundamental problems. For example, Urban Economics, a fairly new course at many schools, relates basic theory to such current issues as urban renewal, property taxes and public-school funding.

Indeed, the study of economics is rapidly reaching downward into lower schools. The Economics Education Council of Massachusetts, in which several universities participate, offers twelve new seminars in economics for elementary-school teachers--who report that their pupils are intensely interested. Says Boston University Professor Kenneth Sheldon: "My elementary school teachers are having remarkable success bringing the basics of economics to their students. Grade-schoolers really want to know how this system operates." And Assistant Professor Norman Ellenberg of California State University, Los Angeles has started an economics education program for children in the Los Angeles city school system--beginning in kindergarten.

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