The University of California - Los Angeles

Date: Dec 03 2003
Major: Economics (This Major's Salary over time)
UCLA did an 8-year review of its program about 3 years ago. It is online at

See section 4, 'undergrad program'. Here are a few quotes:

Ladder faculty are few in number relative to the volume of students served, and as a result classes are large and the requirements for graduation limited.

"Relative to most other majors at UCLA, however, economics undergraduates must contend with a dearth of ladder faculty, a lack of diversity in the courses offered, and limited student-faculty interaction. Our honors program is moribund, with less than 1 percent of our students complet

ing senior theses. Students can easily choose a course of study that will excuse them from having to write a term paper or from having to make a significant oral resentation during their undergraduate years, despite the fact that we know that writing and communication skills are the cornerstones of successful careers."

The share of undergraduate teaching done by ladder faculty plummeted from 40 percent of students in the early 1990s to a mere 25 percent by the middle of the decade.

Obviously, with upper-division class sizes averaging 100, few students develop either the skills or the contact with faculty required for them to contemplate devoting time to independent research.

—So lets summarize your econ experience at UCLA.

You will be stuffed into huge courses, with even the upper-division courses AVERAGING 100 students. While your friends at other colleges are exploring the many fields involved in Econ, you will be limited to a few areas they are able to staff. Only about 1 out of 4 classes will be taught by actual tenured faculty, the rest by lecturers or visiting profs (good luck tracking them down when you need recs for grad school!). But not to worry, with the large class size and lack of papers they aren't going to know you well enough to write a strong letter of rec anyway. Fact is, you're probably writing more papers now in HS than you will as an Econ major at UCLA. And of course since you won't be doing research (according to UCLA, only 1% do) you'll be at a disadvantage compared to those at top universities and liberal-arts colleges who can point to senior theses when they apply to grad school