The Simple Truth About Your Economics Degree

Will you learn a lot about how the economy works?

Let’s just lay it out plainly:

If you’re getting an economics degree, or you just finished one, the good news is you will be able to get a job. For reasons that still baffle some of us, economics degrees are respected in the job market. Employers often treat it like a business degree with a little extra math and theory thrown in. It’s seen as adjacent to finance or business administration — not exactly specialized, but respectable enough to get you in the door.

Now, will employers actually value your economics degree for what you learned? That’s a different story. Most business jobs you’ll apply for will casually ask, "Hey, did you take any accounting classes?" And right there, they’re tipping their hand. They’re basically saying, "We don’t really know what you learned in economics. We just hope you picked up something useful." Accounting is valued more. Finance is valued more. But they’ll still consider you, because the economics label at least says you’re not completely clueless.

If you're panicking about job prospects — don't. Relax. The degree will work. It might not impress anyone, but it will function in the way a degree is supposed to function: it will help you get a job.

That said, if your goal was purely employability, there are better degrees out there — especially if you're aiming for business, finance, or anything with a more clear-cut career path.

Now, if you want the real, unvarnished truth from someone who’s been through it:
For those of us who actually know what an economics degree is about — it’s kind of a joke. The most important lessons are crammed into your intro classes (maybe your first year or two), but after that? It’s mostly glorified math exercises of random stuff put together with no holistic reasoning to tie everything together.

Here’s the real value you get from an econ degree:

• You’ll learn how to follow along with financial news and economic reports.

• You’ll understand some basic, crucial ideas:

  • Value is subjective.

  • Opportunity cost matters (arguably the single most important lesson).

  • Capital investment increases production capacity.

  • Tariffs are usually a bad idea.

  • Markets generally work better than central planning.

If you’re lucky, you pick those up in your intro macro and microeconomics classes — and ironically, those courses often double as general education credits. After that? It’s all downhill.

The higher-level econ courses (300 and 400 level) are basically just math problems wrapped in flimsy economic language. If you struggled with math word problems in high school — where you had to figure out which math you were supposed to use — you’re going to hate upper-division econ classes. They’re not about economics in the real world. They’re about abstract modeling.

Will you actually learn how markets really work? Nope.

Will you get a deep understanding of economic schools of thought? Definitely not.

Will you be able to understand neoclassical economics as a coherent whole? Forget it.

Instead, you’ll pick up a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) lesson over and over again: Markets fail all the time, and here’s how government interventions can "fix" things.

That’s the real message behind most economics curricula at most universities. It’s not a training in economics; it’s a training in identifying “market failures” and justifying central planning.

In short, you’ll spend four years mostly learning nothing you couldn’t have picked up in one or two good intro classes, and the skills you develop — maybe a little statistical analysis, maybe a little computer programming — are too shallow to make you truly marketable on their own.

But hey — this isn’t just a problem with economics.

Most degrees these days, especially in the social sciences and humanities, have the same issues: lazy professors, recycled material, no real-world application. It’s not just you. It’s the whole system.

So if you’re almost done with your econ degree, don’t despair. It’ll still work.

It’s just important to see it for what it is: A credential, not an education.