Pro#222;le of Students - Colby College.pdfVIP

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 19, Number 1—Winter 2005—Pages 175–198 The Making of an Economist Redux David Colander ndividuals are not born as economists; they are molded through formal and informal training. This training shapes the way they approach problems, Iprocess information and carry out research, which in turn influences the policies they favor and the role they play in society. The economics profession changes as cohorts with older-style training are replaced with cohorts with newer- style training. In many ways, the replicator dynamics of graduate school play a larger role in determining economists’ methodology and approach than all the myriad papers written about methodology. Arjo Klamer and I came to that belief in the early 1980s, and it led us to publish our “Making of an Economist” (Colander and Klamer, 1987), which in turn led to a much more thorough study by a Commission on Graduate Education in Economics appointed by the American Economic Association (Hansen et al., 1991). Over the years, I have received numerous suggestions to update our earlier study.1 This paper is the update. The paper reports the findings of a survey and interviews with graduate students at seven top-ranking graduate economics programs: University of Chicago, Columbia University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Yale University and Princeton University. It consists of two parts. The first part explores who current graduate students are and what they think 1 I did this study alone because Arjo has since moved to the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and is no longer involved in U.S. graduate economics education. Our earlier book, The Making of an Economist, is out of print, but I will make it available on the web a