Economics degree course drops 21% in National Student Survey

For interested parties, the following was the University of Manchester's full response to this article. The Economics Department in Manchester has taken a number of steps to enhance its curriculum over the last year: the appointment of Diane Coyle, a leading figure in the national and international Economics curriculum reform debate, as (part-time) Professor of Economics; the introduction of new modules in Economic Policy and Behavioural Economics, and the further incorporation into our specialist programmes of more interdisciplinary options, specifically in global political economy. In addition, we are conducting a wide-ranging curriculum review of our core economics programmes that will benefit not only our specialist Economics students but also those who wish to study Economics as part of a general Social Science degree. We are a large department with a wide range of staff interest, which allows us to teach a more extensive range of subjects than most universities - including environmental, natural resource and development economics - and claims that the range of modules on offer do not address real-world issues is demonstrably untrue. Some 1300 students currently take courses with us, both specialist and non-specialist, and we receive very favourable feedback from the vast majority of these students through the course of the academic year – 2 members of staff in Economics have won University, national and international teaching awards this year. The dialogue with PCES has thus far been valuable, and we hope it will continue to be so, but our understanding was that PCES wished to move forward the debate on general Economics curriculum reform in a constructive and collegial manner, and that this debate should not be confined necessarily to Manchester. It is therefore disappointing that PCES have confirmed (in the information they supplied to the Times Higher) that it campaigned for students to consider using NSS strategically on one issue, which may have adversely affected last year’s results. Nevertheless, last year's NSS BEconSc result is a concern, and a puzzle given that other undergraduate programmes that share many of its modules have improved on overall student satisfaction, and that our Masters programmes have performed very well in the corresponding postgraduate survey. Whilst curriculum review and its integration into a broad Manchester social science education continues this year, our immediate response has been to work with all our current students and their representatives to understand their real concerns so that we can improve the student experience. This has resulted in changes to assessment practices and the imminent introduction of changes governing non-lecture class sizes and enhanced contact time with academic staff, both within these classes and more generally within the Department.