Universities such as Yale and MIT have no shortage of international applicants, but a STEM designation for an economics program unquestionably offers a recruiting edge. In a proposal to change the CIP code for its graduate economics program from the one for economics to the one for econometrics in 2016, the economics department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison cited competition from other programs that had the STEM designation. “This year, we have already had 6 instances of applicants to our terminal MS program declining our offer and accepting the offers [of] other terminal MS programs and the reason given is that the other programs offer a STEM designation,” says the proposal considered by the University Academic Planning Council in 2016.
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