AEA CTREE 2026

PPE and Civic Thought Programs in American Higher Education

What economics is being taught when economics leaves the economics major?

The Puzzle

Interdisciplinary programs are growing where economics departments are not always leading.

PPE and Civic Thought programs are becoming a new venue for economic reasoning, civic formation, and curricular experimentation.

They often attract students interested in policy, markets, democracy, institutions, ethics, and public life.
They are institutionally heterogeneous: majors, minors, certificates, honors tracks, and center-linked curricula.
They create an opening for economists, but also a risk that economics becomes thin, symbolic, or optional.

Research Questions

We extend the economics-major requirements lens to a messier interdisciplinary population.

Economics content

Which economics courses are required, and how often do programs move beyond introductory economics?

Disciplinary balance

How do requirements distribute across economics, politics or law, and philosophy?

Institutional form

How do program category, award type, and documentation depth shape what we can infer?

Method

Program websites become structured requirement records.

Identify

IPEDS CIP searches, targeted web searches, and research assistant discovery generate candidate programs.

Verify

Supervised AI agents sort clear inclusions from maybes; researchers and RAs verify official catalogs for status, requirements, and source quality.

Code

Agents draft source-backed JSON records with confidence flags; borderline cases are reviewed before validation into canonical program and course tables.

Analyze

Course requirements, economics content, disciplinary balance, collection depth, and geography are rebuilt into the live dashboard.

Scope Boundaries

We include civic curricula when civics is the program, not merely a topic inside a discipline.

Included

Named PPE, political economy, civic thought, civic leadership, constitutional studies, and Great Books / civic humanities credentials with verifiable undergraduate requirements.

Excluded

Ordinary political science majors that contain civic content but remain disciplinary programs. They matter, but they answer a different question.

Held Out

Broad interdisciplinary humanities credentials, including Princeton and Saint Mary's Humanistic Studies, unless the program is clearly Great Books as civic education.

Current Dataset

A live, still-growing catalog of PPE, political economy, and civic thought programs.

318

confirmed undergraduate programs in the current dashboard sample

308

course-coded programs available for requirements analysis

42

states represented across the confirmed sample

3

analytic categories: PPE, political economy, civic thought / leadership

Finding 1

The population is not just PPE majors.

The live sample includes majors, minors, certificates, and honors tracks across three program categories.

Open figure

Finding 1B

Institution type changes the mix, not the basic heterogeneity.

Among the 316 IPEDS/Carnegie-classified programs, R1 and Master's institutions are majority civic thought / leadership, while R2s are comparatively PPE-heavy.

PPE Political economy Civic thought / leadership

R1

22%

26%

53%

n=120

R2

36%

30%

33%

n=33

Master's

25%

21%

54%

n=61

Baccalaureate

25%

30%

45%

n=76

Other

42%

27%

31%

n=26

Finding 2

Most of the current sample is now course-coded.

This matters because economics requirement rates are calculated only where requirements are sufficiently coded.

Open figure

Finding 3

Economics is common in PPE and political economy, but technical depth is much less common.

Rates use the course-coded denominator. In Marshall, Underwood & Hyde's economics-major benchmark, intermediate economics and econometrics are core expectations; here they are not.

Open figure

Finding 3B

The thin-depth finding survives across institution types.

Course-coded programs only. Dashed lines mark Marshall, Underwood & Hyde benchmarks for economics degrees: 95.1% require intermediate economics and 54.2% require econometrics.

Intro econ Intermediate micro Econometrics

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

95.1% intermediate economics

54.2% econometrics

R1n=117

R2n=33

Master'sn=61

Baccalaureaten=71

Othern=26

Finding 4

The ternary plot shows three curricular personalities.

Strict classification excludes integrative courses from the denominator; co-authors have cleared this simplex view for presentation.

Open figure

Finding 5

The map is national, but not evenly distributed.

The sample spans 42 states, with visible clustering in large higher-education states and civic-thought growth in selected public systems.

Open figure

Interpretation

These programs are not simply smaller economics majors.

PPE and political economy often preserve a recognizable economics channel, especially at the introductory level.
Civic thought programs are frequently organized around texts, civic formation, leadership, history, and institutional life.
Relative to Marshall, Underwood & Hyde's economics-major baseline, the gap is not exposure to economics but progression into intermediate theory and econometrics.

The central descriptive fact is variation.That variation is curricular experimentation, but it also means “economics” names very different student experiences across programs.

If economists want economic reasoning to matter in civic education, we need to be at the table where these curricula are built. The question is not whether every PPE or civic thought program should become an economics major. The question is what economic literacy these programs owe their students.

Design Exercise

Two plausible programs make the normative question concrete.

42-credit PPE major

Analytical tools for institutions, markets, politics, and values.

Students are drawn to philosophy, data-rich political science, and economics in conversation with normative questions.
Likely paths include management, consulting, government, law school, and graduate work across the social sciences.
The curriculum needs a center that is more than borrowed courses from three departments.

How would you divide the 42 hours, and what economics belongs at the core?

42-credit civics major

Classic texts, constitutional life, and social-scientific literacy.

Students are oriented toward enduring questions: Thucydides, Tocqueville, constitutional history, and theories of justice.
Most are pre-law, think-tank oriented, or seeking humanistic education with marketable analytic tools.
The program needs a center where civic formation and empirical reasoning genuinely meet.

Which social-science tools should sit beside the humanities core?

Use this as a quick audience thought experiment, not a long activity. Doug's FSU example: a possible 12-credit economics channel might include Principles of Micro, Intermediate Micro, Law and Economics focused on property, and Experimental Economics. The list is debatable by design: no macro; game theory might sit in political science; public choice might appear in integrated courses; law and economics opens foundational questions around property and innovation. For Hopkins, Simon's instinct is that intermediate theory would be valuable but may be difficult to require soon. A more likely and broadly useful bridge is a course like Causal Inference in the Social Sciences, probably with intro statistics as an implicit prerequisite, plus an AI/computing course adapted from history to social science and humanities. The goal is for students to read a regression table and understand modern research designs in economics, political science, and adjacent fields. As much as experimental economics matters to us, the broader causal-inference course may be more relevant for this mixed student population.

Implications

The benchmark is not “make everything an economics major.”

Curricular design

Introductory economics may be enough for vocabulary, but not for students expected to reason analytically about markets, institutions, and policy.

Pedagogical bridge

These programs can reach students who want economics connected to ethics, politics, law, history, and public life.

Professional pipeline

If economics major enrollments are softening, interdisciplinary programs may be a recruitment channel rather than only a rival.

During Q&A

The program explorer lets us move from aggregate claims to specific institutions.

Open explorer

Filter by category, program level, state, institution, and methodological flags.
Inspect individual program records and source notes.
Use the explorer as an audit trail: the analysis is designed to update as the dataset improves.

Next Steps

From descriptive catalog to research agenda.

Finish validation

Continue source review, CIP reconciliation, and requirements coding for edge cases and newly identified programs.

Move beyond requirements

Collect syllabi and interview directors to learn what is actually taught, not only what catalogs require.

Normative paper

Use the descriptive findings to ask what economics should look like in interdisciplinary civic curricula.

Thank You

What economics should students meet in civic education?

Live dashboard: https://ppe-civicthought-requirements.simondhalliday.com