What do undergraduates study in heterodox economics programs? An examination of the curricula structure at 36 self‐identified programs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to review the undergraduate curricular structure of 36 self‐identified heterodox economic programs in the USA, Australia, UK and Canada. Design/methodology/approach The author gathers, summarizes, compares and contrasts the structure of 36 undergraduate heterodox departments. Departments are classified into traditional, plausibly pluralistic, and demonstrably heterodox programs. Specific examples illustrate each classification. Findings With notable exceptions described here, most heterodox economics programs are structured as traditional mainstream departments with a few pluralist or political economy electives available. However, 20 departments exist that require at least one heterodox course; eight require two or more. Practical implications A few programs have created imitable curricular structures that one would expect to significantly influence the depth and breadth of heterodox perspectives presented in the undergraduate economics major. Originality/value This is the first published analysis of undergraduate heterodox economics curricula. It highlights the creative structures characterizing some of the English‐speaking world's best programs and demonstrates that the curricula in most programs lack required courses in heterodox economics. The paper also provides examples of intentionally heterodox programs that may serve as models for others to emulate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it