business vs. econ degree

depends on what you want to do and whether you are willing to go to grad school. if you don't really care if you use econ (or business) day to day in your job out of undergrad, then either is fine. imo, major in what you like because you will probably get better grades and i think gpa matters more than what your major actually was.

if you want to be an economist at a think tank or academia or want to be an financial analyst for a wall st firm etc, then you are probably looking at grad school. it isn't an absolute necessity on the wall st side, but it helps a lot. most professional economists i have seen have graduate degrees - in fact most are have a phd.

so, if you are happy in sales or something like that out of undergrad, major in whatever you like more. if you want to be an economist or a financial analyst and expect to go to grad school, i would lean towards an econ degree with an emphasis on quant (econ major / math minor would be ideal) and then an mba in finance if you want to go the financial analyst route or a MS / PHD in econ if you want to go the economist route.

while I agree that economics is a better undergrad major than business... undergrad economics doesn't teach you mathematics, not enough anyway

my advice would be to major in economics and minor (or double major) in math, physics or some kind of engineering

or even vice versa

i was an undergrad math major as I think kartelite was too... having a solid mathematics base is a huge advantage if you want to go on to PhD or MS or even an MBA.

in graduate school, they teach economics with much more mathematical rigor...

you get into multivariable calculus, advanced statistics, real analysis and depending on your specialization measure theory and stochastic differential equations

i still don't understand why they baby undergrad economics majors... when it comes to using undergrad economics in grad school, well you don't at all

[quote]Adam Smith wrote:

Easy answer: Economics is a far better major. Economics will teach you the business concepts, the mathematics and quote]

I'm not sure as they baby you all that much anEconomist...

I'm currently doing an Econ/Management degree and have finished first year but have already covered multivariable calculus and statistics (nothing too complicated but have done ANOVA and a variety of other techniques at a similiar sort of level) as well as moderate levels of optimization theory up-to and beyond Hessian Matrices, positive definite, semi-definite etc..

And I'm not doing straight Econ- I have no idea as I haven't covered the more advanced stuff yet but from what you're saying there doesn't appear to be a great difference between the stuff you've mentioned and the stuff I've covered in my first year.

Whilst the graduate stuff has a much more mathematical basis...I still think they prepare you quite well. Would you consider the difference between under and post grad to be similiar to the difference between Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics and Microeconomic Analysis? As I've been reading Microeconomic Analysis and the stuff isn't all that complicated- same with Sundaram's opitmization theory book, a bit more complicated but with a little time it all becomes simpler?

Anyways- from doing an econ/management degree I'd honestly say that the econ will be of great use, but definitely try and get some accounting stuff done as it will be of great use from everything I've heard/seen. Also I agree with the above in that the more mathematical the course you're on the better!

Perhaps... I am just talking from my experience, maybe others have different experience... I took many undergrad economics courses (I went to a very good undergrad school) and found them to be far from rigorousWhen I started my phd in finance, the first year we take most of the core economics phd courses (with the econ phds)-- with micro and econometrics classes, it was my experience that those who had just majored in economics had the most difficultyThis was especially true when we got into the core finance courses - stochastic calculus, financial economics, asset pricing - those who did just economics usually had trouble catching uplike I said my evidence is just anecdotal but i will say that i though the undergrad courses that I did in economics were very easy... much easier than my undergrad math and physics courses

Fair enough. I imagine that would be very true as the intuition in economics is generally quite simple compared to understanding the mathematics behind it.

From A-level to Undergrad to what I can see of Postgrad the difference I've seen is that the "material" as it were is never all that different but the depth of actually understanding it and having a true(ish) mathematical model is the main difference.

That said...my undergrad work probably is very different from most econ undergrads as I'm at Oxford and had a quite maths intensive tutor.