I teach economics at John Jay College of the City University of New York, home of one of the country’s leading MA programs in heterodox economics. And we are accepting applications for Fall 2025.
This is a pitch for why people should study economics here. If that’s not for you, that’s ok; but please forward it on to anyone who might be interested.
Since 2017, John Jay College has offered a MA program in economics. (The department website is here.) It’s one of the only graduate programs in the country that teaches economics from an explicitly heterodox perspective, where Marxian, Keynesian, feminist and ecological perspectives get equal billing with the conventional economics curriculum.
In their first year, a student in the MA program will take rigorous classes in microeconomics, macroeconomics, econometrics and math for economists, just as they would in other programs. But they might also take classes in economic history, political economy (where they’ll read Marx’s Capital, among other things) and community economic development.
For a small, relatively new and little-known program, we get some amazing students. In recent years, we’ve had as many as eight people in a year go on to PhD programs, out of a typical entering class of 15; this must be one of the highest proportions of any economics MA program in the country.
We also have many students who come here not as a step toward further study, but to strengthen their work in journalism, public policy, advocacy or electoral politics. People who have studied economics at John Jay include Kate Aronoff, author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet, and now a columnist at The New Republic; Aída Chávez, former staff writer for The Intercept and DC correspondent for The Nation, and now communications director at Just Foreign Policy; Jack Gross, editor of the online magazine Phenomenal World; Lauren Melodia, Director of Economic and Fiscal Policy at the Center for New York City Affairs; Rajiv Sicora, legislative director for the United Autoworkers; Anisha Steephens, Senior Policy Advisor for Racial Equity at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Biden administration; Nathan Tankus, author of Notes on the Crises, and research director of the Modern Money Network; and Paul Williams, founder and executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise.
Students in the John Jay economics program have also served as staff for a number of elected officials, including Congressman Jamaal Bowman, New York Assemblymembers Ron Kim and Julia Salazar, and New York City Councilmember Carlina Rivera. Other students have found work doing economic analysis at government agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where several of our former students now work.
Some of our students come into the program with undergraduate degrees in economics, but many do not. (We do require a BA of some kind.) Some come straight out of college, but many are older. All we ask is a willingness to work hard, and an interest in the larger questions that economics is meant to help save — a desire both to understand the world and to change it. Every year I am amazed at the seriousness, creativity, and commitment of our students, and the range of backgrounds and interests they bring to the program.
John Jay economic is not just an academic program, it’s a community. Students and faculty gather regularly for beer and conversation (usually in Brooklyn, where most of us live.) Next week we’ll be having our spring barbecue at a community garden, with speakers and bands. There are regular workshops and lectures. This is a department where you’ll find students and faculty not only working together on research projects, but organizing public events, hosting podcasts, writing op-eds, and speaking out against the war in Gaza. Quite often, our students go on to become our colleagues — many of our undergraduate class are taught by our former students, and unlike many departments, we try to include adjuncts and other contingent faculty in department governance as much as possible.
We’re also an unusually diverse department. While white men are heavily overrepresented in the economics profession nationally, we are proud that half of our faculty are women. In our early graduate cohorts, a majority of students were Black or Latinx, and a majority were women. While these proportions shift from year to year, we consistently have far more nonwhite and female and nonbinary students than most economics graduate programs. If valuing this makes us “woke,” we’ll wear that label with pride.
We are located in midtown Manhattan, near Columbus Circle, easily accessible by transit from anywhere in the New York metro area. All of our classes are in-person, and meet in the evening for one two-hour session per week. Twelve courses are required for graduation. Fulltime students normally take three classes per semester, and finish in two years. But students with heavier professional or personal obligations are welcome to attend part-time, taking fewer than three classes per semester and taking correspondingly longer to graduate.
While we can’t generally offer financial support, John Jay is very affordable compared with similar programs elsewhere. For New York State residents, tuition is $1,410 per course, or $8,460 per year for students taking the standard six courses. (The total cost is the same if you spread your coursework out over more years.) For comparison, tuition at the New School for Social Research, which also offers an economics MA with a strong heterodox component, is $7,320 per three-credit course — about five times as much.
For out of state students, our tuition is $2,565 per course. You need to have lived in New York State for one year to qualify for in-state tuition.
At this moment, it seems to me, the chance to study economics in a program that is both rigorous and engaged with radical politics, at an affordable public university in the heart of New York, is something that many people would be excited by. The problem is, the great majority of those people have no idea we are here. So I’m asking people to share this post. In particular, if you teach college students, please consider forwarding this message or a link to the John Jay Economics Department website to your department list.
Again, the department website is here, with more information. I’m always happy to talk with anyone considering applying; if you have any questions about the program, feel free to reach out to me at profjwmason@gmail.com.
Admission are open until the end of July. The application form is here. And, once more, if you know anyone who might be interested — a college senior thinking about graduate school; an activist or professional who wants a deeper knowledge of economics — and who lives in New York or would like to, please forward this to them.