The Downsizing of Economics Professors

The number of economics professors now teaching at universities will decline substantially over the next couple of decades. This will happen for one main reason—the advent of distance learning, especially in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which enable a single professor to lecture to tens of thousands of students. Other academic fields will undoubtedly encounter similar reductions in their numbers of professors. However, as this book argues at several levels, academic economics is the one profession that is most qualified to study and address the topic. In this sense it is the one profession that should best recognize the economic benefits of this transition, which this book describes, and take responsibility for leading the transition among all academic fields.
Unfortunately, the position espoused by several academic economists has been against this inevitable transition—a position that politically upholds their employment and the status of…