Conference sessions in Developing student skills
Does Studying Economics Influence Employment and Loan Decisions Later in Life?
Presentation at DEE 2017,The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study has been an ongoing project of the National Center of Educational Statistics and consists of three cohorts of college graduates from 1993, 2001 and 2008. While the data collected from each cohort varies, each generally includes interview data, transcript data, as well as data from follow-up surveys. This paper will focus on the 2008 cohort which was interviewed a year after graduation, and again in 2012. We will investigate the employment outcomes of economics majors and students who have taken economics courses. Economics majors and people with economics background tend to make different economics choices in financial decisions later in life. This expands on past research (Allgood, et al, 2011) on the longer-term outcomes of learning economics. Some of the questions the Baccalaureate and Beyond: 2008–2012 data might be able to address are: What kind of jobs to people who have taken economics courses tend to find? How do they pay back student loans? What are the trade-offs people with economics training make between different types of debt? Analysis will use regression models / probit models and will control for basic demographics such as gender, race/ethnicity and family status, as well as the educational and economics background of individuals. Whether economics coursework matters in these decisions is debatable: While economics helps people make more informed decisions about saving for the future (Bosshardt and Walstad, 2017), it is not clear that economics training is needed to understand the need for paying back student loans or car loans or finding a job.
Developing Financial literacy among students in the UK and Russia
Presentation at DEE 2017,Financial literacy is important for people of all ages, but it is especially important for students as they are starting their independent life. Currently in the UK students at schools are supposed to receive basic lessons in the subject as part of their Citizenship GSCE course, but in reality majority of them leave schools without having clear understanding in the subject. Russia is introducing courses on Financial Culture to all students in all universities as part of their financial literacy programme. This paper will be looking at the ways of developing financial literacy (FL) of students in the UK and Russia, starting from measuring existing levels of FL and developing intervention courses and evaluating their efficiency.
Students as Communicators
Workshop at DEE 2017,This CTaLE workshop session will focus on teaching approaches to enhance students’ ability to communicate economics to different audiences. We will explore what effective communication actually means and whether/how we should teach communication skills to our students. Using our own teaching samples, we showcase teaching approaches which focus on communicating economics and encourage participants to explore ways to adapt them for their own teaching. Finally we will explore appropriate ways for feedback assessment of such communication skills.
Go Abroad Economics
Workshop at DEE 2017,Economics students at the University of Edinburgh have the opportunity to participate in an extracurricular study group called “Go Abroad Economics.” Student places to this group are allocated on a competitive basis. The purpose of this programme is to study the economy of a particular country in detail through a series of student-led workshops. As a capstone, students are taken on a partly-subsidised trip to the country in question. Trips last for 1-2 weeks and we take anywhere between 10 and 25 students per trip. The most innovative feature of the trips is that almost everything, from the site visits to the hotels, metro passes and SIM cards are arranged by the students themselves; the staff just book plane tickets and then act in a coordinating role. Most undergraduates have never had to work together to arrange something this complex before, so they learn a lot from the (sometimes bumpy) process. This programme has been running for more than two years, and has been a success. Destinations so far have included China, Ethiopia, Cuba, and others.
