The Office of Student Services has released Enrollment Highlights for the fall, 2014 semester which show that there are 986 undergraduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences economics major and 183 undergraduate students pursuing the Carroll School of Management economics concentration. This is the largest major and concentration, and the largest ever recorded, representing over 12.5% of all BC undergraduates: an even larger fraction than last year's 1,018 majors, which represented a 25-year high for the Economics Department's enrollment. This total does not include those students in the A&S economics minor, nor those International Studies majors who follow the Economics track. The next largest majors/concentrations are Finance in the CSOM (1,100), Biology (867), Communication (846), and Political Science (819). Many A&S undergraduates graduate with two completed majors.
Student Services also announced that 199 students graduated in 2014 with an A&S economics major. This represented 13.3%, or nearly 1/7 of the 1,492 A&S graduates in the August 2013-May 2014 period.
Currently, the Department of Economics has 35 full-time faculty. The department will be hiring additional full-time faculty over the next two years to strengthen the undergraduate and graduate curricula. The number of majors and concentrators has grown far faster than faculty numbers, which would be over 50 if the faculty-student ratio prevalent in the early 2000s was maintained.
25 Oct 2014