I want to start off by saying that I feel very fortunate to attend Oberlin College. I am so grateful for the academic, networking, and lifelong friendship-building opportunities afforded to me during my time on this campus. As a graduating fourth-year, I’ve been thinking a lot about these opportunities and how I will deeply cherish them forever. 

That is to say, I do not write this piece to bemoan that which I identify as a shortcoming of the College’s Economics department, but aim to enact change as one of my parting acts as I look toward my fast-approaching graduation. 

I recently learned that some departments, such as the Jewish Studies department, arose from student activism. This serves as proof, in my mind, that the College has historically listened to students’ academic concerns and has consequently enacted change accordingly. 

As an avid watcher of the show Gilmore Girls, one of my few expectations upon my arrival to campus was that I would feel like I could learn anything I ever wanted to learn in these hallowed and historied halls — like Rory did in her early college days. However, there was one thing I wanted to learn about here but didn’t have the opportunity to: the varied types of world economies. 

I came to college hoping to major in Politics and minor in Economics, expecting that this combination of departmental study would afford me context as to the broader economic and political realities that shape our ever-changing world. 

After taking Introduction to Economics — remotely, in the fall of 2020 — I quickly realized that this would not be the case.

While, as someone who enjoys statistics and statistical modeling, I appreciated Intro to Econ, a more apt title for the course would have been Introduction to the U.S. Economy. But that’s a semantic qualm.

My primary concern is that there are very few courses offered in the the Economics department that focus on non-U.S. economies, and those that do focus on economies beyond our borders do so in one of two ways: exploring the ways the U.S. economy might interact with other economies through trade or exploring the “weak institutional frameworks tha[t]could explain a low growth trajectory,” as in the case of ECON 310, Economic Development in Latin America. 

I would love to have learned about socialism and anarchism, for example, in the same way as we did capitalism in that first Economics course. I later received an education with regard to socialism and anarchism in the Politics department in the course POLT 252 — Capitalism, Socialism, Anarchism: Perspectives on States, Markets, and Justice. In that course, I learned about the varied global economies and read theory pursuant to all three types of economy. 

However, as it was a political theory course, we did not engage in statistical modeling of any sort. I’d advocate for a course such as this one to be taught in the Economics department — so as to engage the graphical element deeply present in Economics research. 

I spoke with College second-year and Economics minor Ben Rapkin to hear his perspectives on the department. 

“Many of the professors are incredibly talented and skilled in their field and in finance and their contributions to academia,” Rapkin said. “Just because it’s skewed in a particular lens or with particular focuses — that doesn’t by any means invalidate much of their research.”

According to Rapkin, this particular lens comes from the professors’ backgrounds as well as the current state of U.S. academia. 

“Just because our nation’s organized with a certain amount of governmental intervention doesn’t mean that in the set of assumptions that they research under and they look at that their mathematical models aren’t perfectly valid,” Rapkin said. “It is just an issue of number one, undergraduates are not at the level to really have those discussions and two, many of them just are not focused on socialist organization and comparing that to capitalism.”

Rapkin initially wanted to major in Economics, but ended up minoring in the department after finding that it was not as interdisciplinary as he would have liked.

“My big issue with the Econ major — it’s really shared by a lot of undergraduate economics programs — and put simply, economics is a really complex hard science,” Rapkin said. “It’s trying to describe how pretty much everything in the world can be better, most efficiently done. But a lot of undergraduate economics is very light on math which is understandable. … However, even the upper-level classes don’t really include a lot of math, which makes it so that any discussion we have is forced onto some very simplistic models that often don’t really describe what happens in the economy.”

Rapkin also spoke to the limitations of the department’s U.S.-centric curriculum. 

“For most of the courses it was very much focused — really all of them, I’ll say — was really focused on the U.S.,” Rapkin said. “The Econ department leans to a focus on micro[economics]. And so in those classes, it doesn’t so much matter which countries specifically, but when we looked at some of the macro[economics] classes — such as intermediate macro or public economics — those classes both focused very heavily on U.S. economics and how our economy functions as a whole. They didn’t really look at a lot of case studies of other countries with different organizations.”

Oberlin College, a school that presents itself as academically progressive, seems to fall behind other Economics programs in its failure to include global economies. Other colleges and universities, though, have modeled this inclusive departmental design. 

For example, the University of Chicago, which is often recognized as having one of the top Economics programs in the United States, includes “The Economics of Socialism” in its department, as well as a course titled “Labor Markets: A Global Perspective.”

Further, the University of Maine offers a Marxist and Socialist Studies minor, which culls an interdisciplinary catalog of courses in economics, philosophy, art history, and more. Harvard University even offered a course titled “The Economics of Socialism” in its Economics department in the spring semester of 1940.

Our History department doesn’t study just U.S. history and our Politics department doesn’t exclusively study U.S. politics — or, rather, global politics as they relate to the U.S. So why, in 2023, hasn’t the College adapted its Economics department to address economies beyond the U.S.?