The Long Goodbye of the History of Economic Thought Course in Liberal Arts Colleges in the United States

Humberto Barreto
Additional contact information
Humberto Barreto: School of Business and Leadership, DePauw University

No 2026-01, Working Papers from DePauw University, School of Business and Leadership and Department of Economics and Management

Abstract: Economists of a certain age will remember a world in which the history of economic thought (HET) was alive and flourishing. Today, that is not the case. One little-noticed consequence of the elimination of HET from graduate programs in the United States is that the HET course is an endangered species at the undergraduate level. It is not, however, extinct. This paper offers a brief history of HET as a course and explores the extent of the diminution in HET courses in the undergraduate liberal arts college curriculum in the United States. Roughly 40% of 146 schools have a HET course in their catalog, but only 20% actively teach the course. I predict a continued decline in the near future, but HET will not completely disappear. An Excel workbook with all results, HETUndergradLA2025.xlsm, is available at dub.sh/HETdata.

Keywords: economics; pedagogy; curriculum; teaching; major; course; history of economic thought (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A00 A20 A22 B00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=dew (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dew:wpaper:2026-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from DePauw University, School of Business and Leadership and Department of Economics and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Humberto Barreto ().