Newmark's Door

Inconsistent with my anecdotal observation of NC State. At NCSU I think it was widely thought that EE was the most difficult.

No evidence presented here, but I vote for an explanation that focuses on the pandemic plus the sad state of a lot of public schools plus the increasing amount of resources available to help parents home school.

Unsurprising: STEM faculty and "Business, Economics, & Law" faculty are on the right side. Humanities and Social Sciences (excluding economics) faculty are much more on the wrong side.

Economics is #7.

Things were getting bad when I left university teaching but not this bad.

Something I stressed when I taught: "I believe that a better approach is instead to focus on the greatest side-benefit of learning economics. This benefit is not a public good, but a fully private one: Economics is interesting. Economics begins with the investigation of one of the most gripping mysteries of human society. . . ."

I had never seen data like this. For the schools that have a higher transfer acceptance rate than their freshman acceptance rate the piece reports the transfer acceptance rate divided by the freshman acceptance rate to rank the schools that are the "easiest" to transfer into. The top three are Emory, Vanderbilt, and UNC.

Hail voting with the feet.

Excerpt of article in Washington Post is here. The Post article--gated, but free if you give them an email--is here. It reports that from 2017-18 to 2022-23, home school enrollment--in the 32 states and DC where home school data was available--increased by 51% while private school enrollment increased by 7% and public school enrollment decreased by 4%. The home school enrollment percentage increase was highest in DC followed by New York state.

Maybe home schooling explain this: "Say, where have all the public-school students gone?"

Professor states it's because of the math required.