I Have a Degree in Economics. I Regret Getting It.

While economics has some serious flaws, I’m not saying it’s useless; I’m just saying that an undergraduate degree in economics is. I hope my journey through collegiate level economics can provide those considering a degree in it some insight.

I, like many others my age, originally came to love economics after reading the book Freakonomics in the eleventh grade. It was the first time that I had read a book cover to cover without stopping. I began to think of economics as decision making science, and I thought that it would be an incredibly valuable thing to study. I no longer believe that.

During my first semester, I took the first of two required math courses for economics majors. It was a pretty basic Calculus 1 class with a great and friendly teacher. The first exam rolled around and the class average was a 54; I got a 114. I’m not saying this to brag, in fact at the time, I wasn’t stellar at calculus. I taught the subject to myself in high school and only got a 3 on the AP Exam. My thought process was that if econ students were only taking two math courses, and they couldn’t succeed in the first one, then they probably weren’t getting jobs which required them to use math. This was shocking to me, because economics has been advertised relentlessly by those in the field as being a quantitative discipline. It really isn’t. I think…