First-Year Students

How to Begin

Effective Fall 2023, incoming students will be required to take Economics 101. The Economics Department will no longer accept AP, IPC, or transfer credit to fulfill this requirement for newly matriculated students.  For students who matriculated before Fall 2023, please refer to the undergraduate bulletin from the appropriate year for placement regulations. 

We advise students to begin economics courses as first-semester freshmen in order to allow for the broadest possible upper-level course selection and access to junior and senior research experiences. Core courses are sequenced as follows:

  • ECON 101D Economic Principles
  • ECON 104D Statistical Foundations of Econometrics and Data Science
  • ECON 201D Intermediate Microeconomics I
  • ECON 205D Intermediate Microeconomics II
  • ECON 204D (Old number ECON 208) Econometrics and Data Science
  • ECON 210D Intermediate Macroeconomics

Please note: These courses do not need to be taken in sequence as long as the prerequisites have been met.

Students may take ECON 205D and 210D concurrently; ECON 204D (old number ECON 208) must be taken before senior year but preferably as soon as possible. By the end of sophomore year, economics students should have completed the mathematics and statistics prerequisites to the major.

Class Sizes

With class sizes of 300-400 students, ECON 101, ECON 104 and ECON 201D are the largest courses economics majors take. Lectures are supported by discussion sections, which are broken in to groups of 15-20 students. In each of the remaining core courses, class sizes are typically 100-200 students, with similarly small supporting discussion sections. Consolidating the core in this way translates to consistency in preparation for all majors, as well as enabling our faculty to teach a wider variety of upper-level electives.