Facts

Key Allegheny Benefits

• Excellent foundation for graduate study in a wide variety of fields: law, business, economics, government.
• A solid grounding in a lifetime's knowledge of America's place in the world economy, its policy issues, and complex social and economic problems.
• Analytical and reasoning skills devel-oped through such quantitative methods as statistics and models and their applications.
• Effective oral and written communication skills, developed in seminar-style classes and independent research.

Allegheny Distinctions

• One of the few undergraduate liberal arts programs to offer a special emphasis in Managerial Economics: finance, accounting, and much more.
• Close interaction with faculty: in seminars, during Senior Project research, and through research assistantships.
• Balance of theory and application in curriculum: opportunity to study business economics (finance and accounting) in a liberal arts framework.
• Practical 'hands-on' experience through internships and study tours (see Experiential Learning).
• Both mainstream and alternative approaches to economics presented in courses representing a broad range of economic areas.
• Small classes, especially in quantitative areas.
• Independent research skills, developed through Junior Seminar and Senior Projects, demonstrating to employers and graduate schools the ability to complete a major original assignment.
• Since 1920, the Department has ranked in the top 12% among private, undergraduate institutions in production of eventual Ph.D.s in economics.
• Cutting edge, technology-based learning in the new Robert Maytum Computer Lab.

Endorsements

• "Senior level courses I took at Allegheny have prepared me very well for my first year in graduate school." - graduate student, University of Illinois
• "When it came time to interview [for graduate school] in my senior year, I was confident. The academic environment was intense, with many students on the graduate school track, and I enjoyed that."- Kevin Baird '84, vice president, Federal-Mogul Corp.
• "The faculty were very dedicated, very interested in the students, and they taught me there was a thing called graduate school. One of my economics professors told me I should go to Harvard Business School. Allegheny was a broadening, eye-opening experience, and then Harvard simply refined my liberal arts base." - James Pomroy '56, chairman, InterNutria, Inc.

Facilities Strengths

• Computers: a departmental lab operates on a "student clock" and is open evenings and weekends. It provides various statistical, business, and word processing software on powerful machines, printers and plotters.
• "Smart classroom": a new networked classroom enables instructors to integrate traditional teaching methods with new technological advances in the economics field.

Student Research and Special Projects

Every Alleghenian completes a Senior Project in his or her major field-a significant piece of original work, designed by each student and a faculty advisor, which proves to employers and graduate schools the ability to complete a major assignment, to work independently, to analyze and synthesize information and to write and speak persuasively.

Recent Senior Projects

• "The Carbonated Soft Drink Industry - A Case Study"
• "Decision-making Under Risk and Uncertainty and a Defense of Graham and Dodd"
• "A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of U.S. Life Insurance Companies, 1960 to 1990"
• "Incentives to Interest Rate Capitalization in International Debt Rescheduling"
• "An Exploration of Portfolio Insurance"

Student Publications and Presentations

The Senior Project and other research projects either conducted independently or in concert with faculty give our students the opportunity for achievements usually not attainable at the undergraduate level. Some recent examples:

• "Decomposing Change in Energy Input-Output Coefficients" (research jointly authored with two faculty members and published in Resources and Energy)
• "Cafeteria Polystyrene and Alternatives" (case research presented jointly with faculty member to regional school districts task force)
• "Evaluating Fuel Tax Equity: Direct and Indirect Distributional Effects" (student/faculty research published in The National Tax Journal)