BU alums Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (CAS’11, Pardee’11) (from left), Stephen Miran (CAS’05), Gina Ortiz Jones (CAS’03, GRS’03), Kristrún Mjöll Frostadóttir (GRS’14), and Alexi Giannoulias (CAS’98). Photos by Caylo Seals, Ben Curtis, Eric Gay, Monasse T/ANDBZ/Abaca/Sipa via AP Photo, and Daniel Boczarski for Niche Media via Getty Images

Alumni

The Rise of a Powerhouse BU Department: Economics

Notable alums—from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the prime minister of Iceland to President Trump’s chief economic advisor to the Illinois secretary of state—have all helped boost the department’s notoriety, while talk about tariffs has made its subject matter all the more timely

Here’s a riddle for you: what do the prime minister of Iceland, the secretary of state of Illinois, one of the most visible Democratic politicians in the United States, the former undersecretary of the US Air Force, the former deputy of Mexico’s ministry of finance, and the chief economic advisor to President Trump have in common?

It’s quite a random list—men and women, Republicans and Democrats, Americans and foreign leaders—but they all carry degrees from Boston University, and from the same department on Comm Ave: economics.

It’s a powerhouse program inside BU’s College of Arts & Sciences that’s gained prominence and notoriety in recent years, thanks in large part to the emergence of five exceptionally notable figures: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (CAS’11, Pardee’11), a Democratic congresswoman from New York, who has become a leading progressive figure in her party; Kristrún Mjöll Frostadóttir (GRS’14), the recently elected prime minister of Iceland, who, at 36, is the world’s youngest serving state leader; Stephen Miran (CAS’05), chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and seen by many as the architect behind Trump’s agenda to upend global trade; Gina Ortiz Jones (CAS’03, GRS’03), a former Air Force officer under President Biden now running for mayor of San Antonio, Tex.; and Alexi Giannoulias (CAS’98), the Illinois secretary of state, who runs the largest secretary of state operation in the country.

“Whenever one of our students succeeds, it’s definitely gratifying,” says Daniele Paserman, a CAS professor and chair of economics, when asked about the eclectic and powerful mix of alums to emerge from his department. “I think we have been able to influence and steer so many students, but ultimately the students are responsible for their own success. It’s gratifying to know some small part of what we did contributed to their way of thinking and to their ambition and rise.”

Numbers tell only part of the story. The department, with 41 tenure-track faculty and 12 nontenure, typically ranks among the top 20 programs in the country. And with more than 1,000 economics majors, almost 150 PhD and master’s students, and more than 200 joint majors in economics and mathematics, it’s one of the largest programs in CAS.

The range of the coursework is diverse—students can study international economics, macroeconomics, health economics, economic history, behavioral and labor economics, and financial and development economics. Many of those courses are taking on increased importance today, with a president determined to grow the US economy by transforming global trade policies through tariffs and other means that many analysts say are risky and unpredictable.

The result is that economics professors can now use daily news headlines to shape their lectures.

“BU’s economics department is absolutely seen as a serious player in the wider world,” says Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and of economics at BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, where he works on the economics of education policy, and who has a joint appointment in economics at CAS. “The department is full of faculty who are very intellectually curious and are willing to think about a wide range of issues from a wide range of perspectives.”

Goodman, who spent the 2022-2023 academic year serving as a senior economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Biden, says the department enjoys “a very healthy quality of dialogue” at a critical time. “We are in a moment where people are worried on college campuses about our ability to have healthy conversations on difficult issues. I have found BU in general and economics in particular to be very open-minded, [where we] look at what the theory is and then at what the data tells us.”

Evolving curriculum

Paserman, who has been in the department since 2007 and its chair since 2024, is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research whose research focus spans labor economics, economic history, political economy, and behavioral economics. He says the last few decades have seen growing interest in economics and how it works, adding that BU has positioned itself perfectly for that surge.

“Economic models help us understand the world and make sense of all the data we have,” he says. “It also has a very empirical and implied policy evaluation that the faculty is engaged in. We talk about current policies and interventions and alternatives.”

That was certainly the case just recently in the international trade course taught by Natalia Ramondo, a CAS professor of economics. In a second-floor classroom in the CAS building, on a brisk spring day with pink buds outside the window, Ramondo showed her 20 students a chart, titled “White House Calculations vs. Actual Tariffs.” 

She focused her lecture and her questions with students on the tariff policies enacted and then paused by the Trump administration. At one point, she spoke about the $237 million trade imbalance with the small African nation Lesotho. The country, she said, exports $240 million in goods to the United States, but imports just $3 million worth. A major reason, she explained, is that Lesotho is home to major denim manufacturers that supply Levi’s and Wrangler with the material to make their jean products. But the country is so small and poor, it could never come close to importing a similar volume of American-made products to balance its trade figure.

Paserman teaches labor economics and the effect of policy on the minimum wage. “It’s very natural to address these kinds of [topics],” he says. “To translate ideas from the ivory tower to the real world. Tariffs, and international trade—these are topics that are critical to the curriculum.”

And as economic policies and interests shift year to year, or from administration to administration, course curricula evolve too. Paserman says a course on environmental economics is immensely popular, almost always reaching its enrollment cap of 50 students. The same is true for a course on the economics of less developed regions and economics history, where students learn to make sense of today’s economic models compared to what happened 100 or 500 years ago.

Newer courses on urban economics—and how cities grow and how income is distributed in cities—are also popular, as is a course on the economics of education, covering education policies, the financing of schools, and incentives for teachers and students.

Another draw for the department is that its faculty is full of individuals with practical experience in the worlds of finance, politics, and economics. For example, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a BU William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Economics, is a fellow of the Econometric Society and was named one of the world’s 25 most influential economists by the Economist. In the early 1980s, he served as a senior economist with the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, under President Ronald Reagan, and he has consulted for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and dozens of other global banking and government organizations. 

Economics pays

In 1975, the number of combined undergraduate and master’s-level college students studying economics in the United States was 16,828. In 2020, that combined number was more than double that, at 39,461. A big reason for the rising interest, studies have shown, is there are significant monetary rewards.

One study, in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, found that studying economics boosted a graduate’s annual early-career pay by $22,000 compared to a student’s second choice for major. 

“Choosing what you study in college has dramatic ramifications for labor market success, and the economics major seems to provide very large wage returns for students,” coauthor Zachary Bleemer of the University of California, Berkeley, says of their American Economic Journal findings.

But as the success of some of BU’s famous alums has shown, plenty of people use their economics education not as an avenue to a finance career, but more as a springboard into worlds where understanding basic economic principles is critical. Santiago Levy (CAS’77, GRS’78,’80), now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for instance, became one of Mexico’s senior economic and finance leaders.

“I really value how BU’s economics department, as well as the University, instilled the importance of thinking critically and inspired me to take different approaches when it came to solving problems, which is essential for a practical understanding of economics,” says Giannoulias, the Illinois secretary of state, who was previously the state treasurer. “Advocating for innovative policy solutions and economic strategies that would make a difference in people’s everyday lives is what motivated me to run for elected office.”

Jones, from San Antonio, Tex., attended BU on a four-year Air Force ROTC scholarship and graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies and a BA and an MA in economics. She entered the Air Force as an intelligence officer, deployed to Iraq, ran unsuccessfully for a US House of Representatives seat, and now is running for mayor of her hometown. 

Ocasio-Cortez came to BU from the Bronx with a passion for science, but ended up graduating in 2011 with a double major in international relations and economics. Her internship while at BU, in the immigration office of the late US Senator Ted Kennedy (Hon.’70) (D-Mass.), shifted the course of her life and career—and drove her to eventually seek the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s District 14. Despite being wildly outspent by the long-term incumbent, Ocasio-Cortez won the primary in a shocking vote and easily won the general election.

Before Frostadóttir, a native of Reykjavík, Iceland, made history as Iceland’s new prime minister and the youngest serving prime minister in the world, she had an impressive academic background, with degrees from the University of Iceland, BU, and Yale. 

Miran, meanwhile, majored in economics, mathematics, and philosophy while at BU in the early 2000s and then completed his PhD in economics at Harvard before joining a global investment firm. Long a proponent of tariffs as an economic engine—he once said, “American economic history has seen periods of high tariff rates coincide with extraordinary economic success”—Miran was tapped by Trump in December to lead the influential Council of Economic Advisers and immediately boosted the administration’s tariff-first agenda.

Goodman says the diversity of backgrounds to emerge from the department is testament to its curriculum and faculty. 

“I think the reason for the continued strength of economics as a subject is that it fundamentally is training people to use qualitative tools and use them for social science and for social policy to help people,” he says. “It’s a very appealing combination, the intersection of human concerns, but done in mathematical language.”

The headlines today, Goodman says, will almost assuredly increase interest and future enrollment in economics. “As well they should,” he says. “People want to learn about things that are challenging and that are important to their lives.”

Paserman says his favorite feedback from former students conveys a simple message: “The emails that I most like to receive are the ones that say, ‘I loved this course or that course, and it helped shape my career.’”