SOME DAYS IT STINKS EVERYWHERE. Economics departments tend to get little respect elsewhere in the university, because they resist the evidence-free pieties of the identity politics crowd, because they teach an unavoidably technical (read "hard") subject that everybody claims to understand, and because the professors are expensive hires.

Although I gripe, I can understand the mind-set of others, particularly at mid-majors where people have trouble grasping something other than a safety-school, maintain enrollment model. Now comes news of similar troubles at Harvard.

An editorial in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, notes:

The economics department is perennially plagued with abysmal satisfaction ratings and high student-to-faculty ratios.

It is true that student satisfaction is lower in economics than in most other departments at the university and that student-faculty ratios are higher. I have been told, however, that if you do a regression of a department's student satisfaction on its student-faculty ratio, the economics department is right on the regression line. This fact suggests that our student satisfaction is low precisely because the student-faculty ratio is high.

No doubt, somewhere in Cambridge sits an REMF with a spreadsheet detailing precisely how enrollment-impacted the economics department is, and how high its cost per student credit hour is, and how far from the threshold for a new hire those figures place it.

The Crimson editorial implores the econ department to take action to prevent the elimination of the junior seminar program. But that will prove hard to do with existing resources. If the student-faculty ratio is the ultimate problem leading to low satisfaction with the econ major, and I believe that it is, there are two ways to improve the situation: Increase the number of economics faculty or decrease the number of economics students.

Perhaps there is a Pareto improvement for the economics department. Simply estimate the elasticity of Harvard's selectivity rating with respect to standards for admission to the major. Fewer majors, lower student-to-faculty ratio, forsooth! That's not an option in a state university, particularly if enrollments are necessary for debt service.

I am confident we in the economics department would be happy to hire more faculty if only the university would allocate us more faculty slots. In a world of finite resources, the question becomes, where would those faculty slots come from? I would be eager to hear from the students which departments they think should shrink.

The preceding illustrates why I'm not wholly unsympathetic to people who would have universities run more like businesses. The steam division of Union Pacific has to make a business case each year for keeping 844 and 3985 choo-choo'in around the west. That decision doesn't necessarily take resources away from the intermodal department of the freight division: the steamers pay for the Alemite guns and the stackers pay for the Imperial Walkers. It doesn't have to follow that an additional hire for economics means an anthropologist gets cut off.

If there are administrative departments that could be reduced or eliminated, that could make room for more faculty. Or, following Brandeis, we could sell off some of the collection in the university art museum! Universities like people, face tradeoffs. If the university is to provide more small classes in econ, it will need to provide less of something else. Right now, I do not see the university administration making substantial efforts to find more resources for the economics department. Sadly, we are not a major priority.

I hear you, Brother Mankiw.

Limiting enrollments isn't easy, either.

Right now, despite the low satisfaction reported on student surveys, economics is the most popular major. The economics department could reduce the number of students by making econ a selective major (e.g., you would need a certain grade in ec 10) or by raising requirements (e.g., every major would have to take multivariate calculus and linear algebra).

Many faculty in the economics department would object to trying to reduce the number of students because we think it is great that so many students choose to major in economics. But if the students make this choice, and the university fails to allocate resources to increase faculty and bring the student-faculty ratio closer to the university average, then it seems almost inevitable that students will leave the major with a below average level of satisfaction.

But those student-credit-hours-per-faculty-member and cost-per-credit-hour metrics will satisfy the REMFs.

I'll note one other thing: throughout my career, a task I have a lot of difficulty with is breaking graduate students of the habit of automatically taking derivatives. Yes, you could raise the math prerequisites, but do you want to?