General Admission Information: Department of Economics at Purdue

Each year the department of economics enrolls about 10 students, among whom about 8 are funded. At Purdue, your tuition fee is waived if and only if you receive assistantship. The assistantship should be enough supporting you.

If you are an international student, one caveat for you: although not stated officially, the economics department at Purdue has not enrolled international students who are not currently studying in the United States, and it’s unlikely that this will change soon. Under rare circumstances some international students got admitted to the PhD program in Economics directly after they receives a bachelor or master degree in their own country, but none of them got funding.

I knew this after I came to this program. This tells you it is a good idea to contact current students at the programs you want to apply for checking their admission policies that are not stated officially.

The Admission Process

The admission decision is made based on overall evaluation of the applicants, and it is hard to say which component is more important than others. I know recommendations are quite important, but all the faculty members are well aware that students from China and India write their own recommendations, rendering the recommendations useless for them. For other application materials, it varies among universities and even varies among different departments in the same university as to which one is valued most. But I know that for most graduate schools, PS is of less importance. A bad PS might nevertheless have a detrimental impact on your application. Since math is pretty important for economists, it’s good if you have strong math skills and background.

A professor once told me that the ideal recommendations are written by economists who are active in research. Economists who are known by the admission committee are perfect. I've heard one previous econ PhD student at Purdue transferred to Northwestern mainly due to a good recommendation letter: her former advisor graduated from Northwestern and wrote her a good recommendation.

Do I need to contact the professors while applying for the program?

I have studied engineering before, so I know there is a big difference between economics program and other programs including engineering, math and the natural sciences. During the admission in engineering, if a faculty member would like to admit you as his student and work with him, you are almost guaranteed to get admitted. This is because most areas in engineering are project-oriented. The professors have funding for some projects, and they can support you financially using the funding so that you can help them with the projects.  Because this close working relationship between you and your advisor, your research area and “interest” is more or less determined since the first day you come, that is the research area and research interest of your advisor. Another consequence of this project-oriented nature of engineering is that it is comparatively easy to publish a paper compared with economics. After you get data or results from the project, you can publish them as an article paper. Most of the papers you publish, if not all, will be coauthored with your advisor, again due to the close working relationship.

It is another story in the departments of economics in the Unites States. The PhD students studying economics typically spend the first one or two years studying theory. After the courses of theory, they will try to pass the qualifying (preliminary) exam. It is after this exam that the students really start to do research. You will also notice that only a small portion of the papers published by economics professors are coauthored with their students because the seldom need any concrete help from their students: most of the papers are written by themselves or coauthored with other professors from similar fields.

Due to this, the students are not paid by the professors, but by the department. Also due to this, in contrast to engineering program, one professor alone cannot decide whether to admit you. It is the group decision of the committee. Hence it is less important to contact any professors during the admission process, and it is useless claim the advisor that you want to work with before you come. The professors are pretty aware that it’s too early for you to claim your field before you come to the program. Hence it’s not necessary to decide which area you want to work in, but it might help if you mention your interests in your personal statement to show that you are self-motivated.