NEW YORK, May 16, 2019 — Barnard College announced today that members of the College’s Economics Department have been awarded a $1 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The grant will support CORE Academy, an initiative dedicated to the reform of economics education and enrichment of economic discourse. Barnard faculty will work with colleagues from Columbia University and other institutions to produce open-access teaching and learning materials designed to facilitate a deep understanding of real-world events.
"With CORE, Barnard faculty and students have a chance to delve into many of the opportunities and challenges facing the world," said President Sian Leah Beilock. "By connecting issues like inequality, the future of work, and the environment to economics education, we are helping to enable the next generation of scholars to address the pressing issues of today."
In the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis, Wendy Carlin of University College London brought together a global collaborative of leading economists to spearhead the Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project. Since its launch in 2013, CORE’s innovative curriculum has been adopted by 240 colleges and universities in 44 countries. CORE Academy will further CORE’s development, cultivating a community of academic experts, content creators, and classroom instructors to develop empirically motivated and historically informed economics course materials for U.S. students.
“Introductory courses ought to give students an understanding of the major economic issues of our time — inequality and sustainability, automation and the future of work, globalization, and immigration — but seldom do such topics get discussed there,” said Barnard Economics Department Chair Rajiv Sethi, who will be leading the initiative with Homa Zarghamee, Suresh Naidu, Rena Rosenberg, and Sarah Thomas. “Because the standard U.S. economics curriculum has changed little over the last half century, it showcases less and less of the field’s expanding scope. Aligning the curriculum with cutting-edge contemporary research will also help us attract strong, socially engaged students to economics courses, the profession at large, and to public policy more generally.”
More than 1.5 million students enroll in at least one undergraduate economics course per year, and approximately 40,000 receive a bachelor’s degree in the subject. While economics is among the most popular majors at Barnard, fewer than 30% of economics majors in the United States as a whole are women; this figure is lower than the corresponding figures for mathematics (40%), earth sciences (40%), chemistry (50%), and biology (60%). Economics majors also tend to come from more economically privileged families and are 50% more likely to have parents who are top managers and professionals than students of other majors.
“The success of CORE Academy rests on its ability to recruit some of the best teacher-scholars in higher education,” said Provost and Dean of the Faculty Linda Bell. “This generous funding from the Hewlett Foundation will help us to expand CORE across U.S. educational institutions, which we believe can increase the interest in economics from incoming first-years, particularly in populations underrepresented in the discipline, like women and first-generation students. A key difference in how Barnard approaches economic studies is our emphasis on the historical, social, and political foundations of economic thought. CORE Academy will be very much at home at Barnard.”
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About Barnard
Barnard provides a singular educational experience, as a world-renowned college focused on excellence across the arts and sciences, with all the academic resources of Columbia University and the city of New York as an extended classroom. Founded in 1889, Barnard was one of the few colleges in the nation where women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education available to men. In 2018, 35% of Barnard graduates were STEM majors. Today, Barnard is one of the most selective academic institutions in the country and remains devoted to empowering extraordinary women to become even more exceptional. For more information on Barnard College, contact Barnard Media Relations at 212-854-2037 or mediarelations@barnard.edu. To learn more, follow Barnard on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
About the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a nonpartisan, private charitable foundation that advances ideas and supports institutions to promote a better world. For more than 50 years, we have supported efforts to advance education for all, preserve the environment, improve lives and livelihoods in developing countries, promote the health and economic well-being of women, support vibrant performing arts, strengthen Bay Area communities and make the philanthropy sector more effective. Today, the Hewlett Foundation is one of the largest philanthropic institutions in the United States, awarding over $400 million in grants in 2018 to organizations across the globe to help people build better lives. Established through the personal generosity of the Hewlett family, the foundation is wholly independent of the Hewlett Packard Company and the Hewlett Packard Company Foundation. hewlett.org
