Economics (Major)

The College of Arts & Sciences’ economics program provides students with the analytical, quantitative, and communication skills needed to thrive in an increasingly global economy. Led by expert faculty from around the world, you’ll learn to think logically to solve problems and leverage datasets to make important inferences with real-world application.

Join a vibrant and supportive community of students and scholars who work with data to address social challenges and evaluate policy decisions. During hands-on courses, research opportunities with professors, and internships, you’ll analyze complex topics like crime, unemployment, inflation, taxes, sports, and voting behavior. Graduates from our program go on to earn advanced degrees or pursue impactful careers in international relations, finance, government, business, or public policy.

Students in our economics program will:

• Master core economic concepts and relate them to real-world events
• Learn how to collect, clean, organize, and interpret data
• Define and execute research projects
• Implement common techniques of data analysis, including visualization, tabulation, and regression models
• Apply critical thinking to economic and social issues
• Effectively communicate ideas and results through oral presentations and clear and concise writing

Program Options
The Major

• As an economics major in the College of Arts and Sciences, you can earn a BS or BA in economics while completing the CAS general education core. The BS in economics is STEM-designated. This is particularly attractive for international students who are able to extend their OPT by two years after graduation. Our curriculum provides students with a broad study of the field, requiring courses such as intermediate microeconomics, global macroeconomics, data analytics, and statistics, as well as three electives of your choosing.

The Minor

• Gain a fuller perspective on the issues facing our world today with a minor in economics. Courses on macroeconomics, microeconomics, statistics, and more will teach you how to handle datasets and build a solid analytical framework you can apply to other disciplines.

Customize Your Degree
Many economics students choose courses, minors, or double majors in areas that will complement their skills such as:

• Black Studies Minor
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Spanish
• Undergraduate Law/Legal Studies

Internships & Careers
Four students walk down a street in Downtown Boston
As an economics student at Suffolk, you’ll use Boston as your lab to put theory into practice by:

• Tracking the prices of items in local stores, comparing costs between shops, graphing changes over time, and predicting future trajectory
• Using real estate apps and city tax information to identify home prices in local neighborhoods and building models to explain why prices differ between houses
• Visiting the map exhibitions at the Boston Public Library and reflecting on the economic causes and effects of development patterns over time

By your senior year, you’ll be able to view complex real-world data and behavior through the frameworks of multiple economic theories – skills you’ll apply by conducting your own independent research and presenting it to peers and faculty during our senior seminar.

Continuing Education

• Between a quarter and a third of our graduates pursue a range of graduate degrees at prestigious institutions, including Boston College, UMass Boston, Fordham, Harvard, Bentley, Brooklyn Law, Boston University, Paris School of Economics, and Suffolk. Recent graduates have gone on to PhD programs at Vanderbilt, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh.