Surveying university student standards in economics

Economic Papers (Economic Society of Australia), June, 2005 by Peter Abelson

In late 2003 and early 2004 the Economic Society of Australia surveyed the Heads of Economics Departments in Australia to determine their views on three main issues: student standards; major factors affecting these standards; and policy implications. This paper describes the main results of the survey, reviews the conduct and value of this kind of survey, and discusses policy implications for economics in universities. Most respondents considered that student standards have declined and that the main causes include lower entry standards, high student/staff ratios, and a declining culture of study. However, some respondents argued that standards are multi-dimensional and that people may properly attach different weights to different attributes. Strong precautions assuring anonymity to respondents minimised strategic responses, but may not have eliminated them entirely. However, the respondents' views were based largely on experience rather than evidence and a major finding of this paper is the need for more evidence on standards and on the factors that influence them. Most respondents favoured a decentralised university-based approach to dealing with these issues, contending that centralised accreditation is inappropriate and that market forces would promote quality issues. In the writer's view, externally set and assessed exams as part of university examination procedures would lift standards and send out improved market signals.

Keywords: Universities, Educational standards.

JEL Code: A20

1 Introduction

Over the last decade, following for example Abelson (1996) and Lewis and Norris (1997), the economics profession has been exercised considerably with declining enrolments in economics majors, and the causes and consequences of the changes. Nearly all analyses, including these two papers, have pointed to competition by other commerce-based subjects, most notably business studies, as the major cause of declining numbers in economics majors (for example, see also Bloch and Strombeck, 2002). Two major consequences of the expansion in related commercial subjects have been a large increase in students in economics service courses and a perceived lowering of standards (Alauddin and Tisdell, 2000; Millmow, 2002).

The economics profession has been divided as to how best to deal with these changes, and in particular it is divided about teaching strategies. The traditional approach, embodied in a major survey of professorial opinion described in Anderson and Bland (1992), was that economics departments should provide a 'rigorous classical economics education to students'. Opinion has shifted a little since then and there is a more widespread view that this approach needs to be softened with a more utilitarian strategy and more real-world applications (Bloch and Strombeck, 2002; Guest and Duhs, 2002). On the other hand some economists, such as Millmow (2002), argue more radically that greater application of heterodox economics would retain the rigorous approach of traditional economics and be more accessible and realistic, while avoiding the typical 'dumbing down' of economics in business study courses.

The central topic of this paper is closely related to these issues: it is the question of student standards in economics. Drawing on the survey by the Economic Society of Australia (2004), the paper is concerned with trends in student standards in economics, their causes, and possible policy responses. But the paper goes beyond the findings of the survey to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of such surveys in estimating student standards. And it goes beyond the standard discussion of teaching strategies to discuss a wider range of policy options for student standards.

In the last fifteen years, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total number of students in Australian universities. Between 1990 and 2003, the number nearly doubled from 485,000 to 930,000. Between 2000 and 2003, the number rose by some 30 per cent from 695,000 to 930,000. Nearly 200,000 of the current students are from overseas. On the other hand, the total effective full-time staff increased by little over 10 per cent between 1995 and 2003 (from 80,754 to 89,370). University wide, the student/staff ratio rose from 15.3 in 1995 to 21.4 in 2003. (1)

In these circumstances it would seem inevitable that average standards would fall. It is true that average standards could fall and that all students could be as well or better educated than without the increase in enrolments. Thus universities could still be adding value generally. However, there is widespread concern within and without universities that the expansion in university enrolments has been at the expense of a general decline in the quality in university education. In 2001, after a lengthy inquiry and numerous submissions, a Senate Committee found "strong evidence to demonstrate that many subject disciplines in many universities had experienced declining standards in recent years". (2) Many other countries have had similar experiences.