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How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 195 the experience that this man had had working as an economic advisor in the White House. The students played that role in the simulation and learned how economics is used in the real world. All of this is really beside the point, however. I learned, during these conversations, that at Columbia calculus is required in order to be an economics major. I wondered about this, since the courses we were building never had any complicated math in them, so it seemed that calculus wasn’t something that came up regularly in real-world economics. I asked and was told that my observation was right and that cal- culus was required in order to ensure that there wouldn’t be too many economics majors. As an insider in the university world, I understood this remark, but it needs some explaining for outsiders. Columbia doesn’t have an undergraduate business major. And, in New York City there are a lot of students interested in business. Colum- bia and other Ivy League schools think that business isn’t an academic subject, so students shouldn’t learn it until they go to graduate school. Columbia does have a well-respected business school, but, as I pointed out, no one really wants to teach undergraduates so they certainly aren’t lobbying to teach them. (This is also true of medical schools and law schools and it is why you never see courses for undergraduates in those fields despite the evident interest of the undergraduates.) So, potential businesspeople at Columbia need to major in some- thing and economics seems to them to be a reasonable second choice. (I am not really sure that it is a good choice but these are 18-year-olds making these decisions.) Thus, the Economics Department is flood- ed with potential majors. This seems like it would be a good thing, doesn’t it? Students want to study what you teach. Isn’t that good? Well, not really. Let us assume we have an economics faculty of 20 people, each of whom teaches three courses a year. So we can offer 60 courses. Sounds like a good number. But this has to include graduate seminars, and the faculty will be lobbying to have more of these and more advanced courses where they can teach their own specialty, as I have said. But majors need courses too. They might need 20 or more. This doesn’t leave a lot for introductory courses unless the department runs enor- mous lecture courses that have hundreds of students. Now depart- ments know that such courses are pretty awful things and they try to keep them down to a dull roar. But if you have hundreds of students wanting to take your courses, and you were set up with just enough HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023941