New Graduate Program - MS in Economics and Innovation

The application link will be available on January 1st, 2025.
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A bachelor's degree in economics can be the opening to a successful career in almost "Anything and Everything."

Economics studies how people make choices when facing scarcity. Human behavior has important implications for the outcomes of markets, government policies, and all corporate and public decision-making. As a result, economics graduates are in high demand from employers across various industries. The advantage of majoring in Economics is that it provides excellent preparation for diverse career opportunities and exceptional financial rewards. A 2011 New York Times article indicated that majoring in Economics gives graduates the best chance of joining the top 1% earners. A 2019 Forbes article concluded that choosing to major in Economics over alternatives causes earnings to rise by $22,000 per year, or 46%, during students' mid-twenties.

The unique value of S&T’s Economics program:

By completing 120 credit hours, students can earn a bachelor's degree and multiple undergraduate certificates in Decision Data Analytics, Energy Economics, and Financial Economics and Technology.

The unique features of S&T’s Economics programs include: 

  • It is a STEM-designated Bachelor of Science (BS) degree.
  • Have three (3) industry-focused emphasis areas - 1. Energy Economics, 2. Financial Economics & Technology, and 3. Decision Data Analytics, designed to create specific career paths for students.
  • Have a departmental in-house student service center that offers “personalized” career identification and development from day one.
  • Enable non-economics majors, including business, engineering, and science students, to take industry-focused certificates, quantitative economics minor, and even Economics as a second major to add job-market competitiveness to students’ primary major.

Why S&T’s Economics?

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The Department of Economics at S&T strives to provide a transformative education for student career success. Our curriculum emphasizes a “personalized” educational experience that allows students to combine their academic strengths with their career goals, personal interests, and characteristics through a set of carefully designed market-driven multidisciplinary degree programs.

As one of the founding departments for the Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, we are embarking on an innovative strategic approach to student career success. The process starts with each student working with our in-house career development officer to identify a viable career path. The students will then be guided to the academic degree program that fits best with their chosen career paths, selecting from an extensive list of experiential learning activities (e.g., company projects, (global) internships, mentored research, etc.) that will allow them to learn the essential skills expected from today's professionals. The department collaborates with the business and industry leaders, further assisting students in gaining valuable professional experiences that will serve to reinforce our industry-centric and career-ready curriculum.

Residing in a STEM-focused research university, S&T’s Bachelor of Science Economics is a STEM-designated program designed to be rich in modern quantitative methods and applied analytical tools through a combination of business, mathematics, programming, and statistics classes. In addition to enhancing students’ understanding of human behavior by drawing upon information from social science fields, our economics curriculum is focused on providing students with the analytical ability to make effective resource allocation decisions and to solve complex issues for businesses, organizations, and policymakers in modern society. Our program offers three industry-focused Emphasis Areas – Decision Data Analytics, Energy Economics, and Financial Economics and Technology. Each area is carefully designed to meet the specific needs of students and industry.

We look forward to working with the community and its stakeholders to continually seek new paths that will lead to every student’s success, from classroom to career.