Harper has a Master's Degree in Economics, he is brilliant.
Walker is not in Harper's league.
A master's in econ isn't that impressive........I mean, a BS in engineering is loads harder.
At top 10-15 US schools, undergrad econ is usually considered an equivalent to engineering, physical science, comp sci, and math because there is a very high degree of quantitative emphasis according to Wall Street Oasis. (At non-elite schools, it's sort of already at an in-between tier of difficulty between those and some of the more rules-based disciplines.) At the graduate level, that quantitative element is ubiquitous. The comparison you are making isn't really fair as much as you love your engineering.
Nonetheless, the argument was that graduate work in economics >>>> a 2.5 whatever in an incomplete Mickey Mouse stratego curriculum only done so that he could obtain power in a semi-meaningless organization. I don't usually believe education is very indicative of intelligence, but it should be obvious that Harper is very bright. Hard to tell with Walker so far.
Good points.........I was speaking more along the lines of state universities where engineering tends to be kick-butt (a lot of weeding out) and econ not so much. A master's in econ is impressive and I definitely like the field; I just thought "brilliant" was a bit of an overstatement. Then again, no credentials really guarantee "brilliance," with Bush and his Harvard MBA.
Engineering is kick-butt at pretty much any university, and with good reason. You don't want the people designing the bridges we drive on and the pressure valves keeping dangerous chemicals away to be woefully incompetent fools who just phoned it in for four years. Same story with pre-med.
Economics can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. If you want to focus on econometrics and multivariate time series analysis and all that, it gets messy. If you want to focus on economic history and do a thesis on lesbian Guatemalan women using microfinance to sell artisanal crafts to finance local water infrastructure, it's going to be more like your run-of-the-mill social sciences degree. Obviously your job opportunities will be less horrifying if you choose the former route.
Getting the master's degree was more a function of me not really knowing what I wanted to do and feeling like I needed some sort of post-graduate credential to make myself acceptable to my
haut bourgeois family and peer group, and pursuing a doctorate seemed so intimidating and committing. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did it generate a good ROI in terms of my salary and job opportunities? Not really. Were I to go back in time a couple of years, I probably would have done something more marketable like accounting or information systems.
