Should I Study Economics or Business Administration?

Are you a theoretical person or a hands-on person? Economists get to juggle numbers and discover theories that might be earth-shattering in the field of economics, but have little impact or interest for anyone not closely following the subject. Meanwhile people who study business administration will probably spend the vast majority of their time dealing with practical, often pretty tedious problems that have to be overcome to keep a company functioning.

At some point, all economists have to realize that economic policy is ultimately decided by politicians, for whom all their beautiful economic models and theories don’t really matter. That is probably the most frustrating aspects when you study economics: you can really see how easy it would be to fix most of the problems we have, but you know it’s never going to happen. On the other hand, those who study business administration have the opportunity to make a real impact – albeit within a fairly limited context.

Business administration is the most studied subject in the US. And if you hope that your degree is going to land you a spot on an executive training program at a Fortune 100 company, and you are not studying at an Ivy League college, you got another one coming. The reality is that most business administrators have boring, paper-pushing 9-to-5 jobs for a long time before they get a really interesting position. The good news is that whether you study economics or business, you can expect some of the highest starting salaries around.

The single biggest problem when you study economics is that it can be too broad, and too theoretical. It gives you very few skills that are immediately applicable within the workplace. Meanwhile business degrees specifically give you the skills need to help run a business. But as anyone with real business experience will tell you, university education does not really prepare you for leading a business – you need to learn on the job.

At the end of the day, economics and business degrees are likely to lead to a very similar set of career options. In this sense, they are almost interchangeable. I’d say the biggest issues to consider are whether an economics degree will be too broad, and whether there are already too many other people who study business administration. If you are not sure yet, don’t panic. Chances are that the first two years of classes are going to be almost identical and it will be really easy to switch into the other subject.

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