Students Vote With Their Feet, Too

Wassily W. Leontief, Lee Professor of Economics, may have announced his resignation in January, but the repercussions of his move--particularly his citing of the "strong sense of alienation" among graduate students at the time--surfaced again last week and emphasized that problems in the Economics Department will probably not disappear any time soon.

Zvi Griliches, professor of Economics and chairman of the department's graduate admissions committee, last week blamed the bad national publicity the department endured following Leontief's resignation for the loss of several highly-rated graduate school applicants in Economics to MIT, Harvard's main competitor.

In the last several years Harvard and MIT's Economics Departments normally have had the same list of most sought-after graduate applicants, usually amounting to 15 or 20 students. The same "excellent" students, Griliches said, apply to both schools.

Once these students are mailed their acceptances in late March, the normal pattern has seen MIT getting return acceptances from slightly more of the top-ranked future economists than Harvard does, with an 8-7 split of the first 15 having been usual in recent years.

But this year, the "first returns" on the highly-rated students' acceptances presaged a disaster: the Ec department, in April, seemed to be losing almost all of its favored applicants to MIT's supposedly more "faculty accessible" department. When all the student acceptances were in, Griliches found the Ec department had lost as many as ten of its top 15 applicants to MIT.

Griliches is disturbed by the drift among future economics stars away from Harvard and attributes it mainly to the department's reputation for "impersonality and coldness," which was highlighted by an article in The New York Times after Leontief's announcement and by word-passing and gossip in other universities' economics departments.

And sources in the department said last week that the department is considering graduate program reforms to stop future grad school applicants from "voting with their feet," just as Leontief did in January.