The “mainstream” doctrine dominates economic education in Europe

In a previous article, we saw that there are two main ways of thinking about economics. The first is the Austrian school of economics, an individualist and deductive methodological tradition. The second is an empirical, aggregate-based approach: the mainstream tradition, also known as modern macroeconomics or simply “the mainstream”. It is this latter tradition that dominates economics teaching today, and overwhelmingly so, as we will see.

The method is straightforward: take degree programs, module descriptions and the credits assigned to each course, then classify them according to the school of economic thought they reflect. In recent years, three university research teams have carried out this exercise in three of Europe’s largest countries, using three different methods. Their findings are closely aligned.

In France, mainstream economics accounts for 86.2% of the credits

In 2023, three academics — Sophie Jallais, Florence Jany-Catrice and Arthur Jatteau — published the most comprehensive study yet conducted in France on this subject [1]. Their 160-page report examined 6,433 courses taught in economics and management bachelor’s degree programs at 53 public universities in France, nearly all of those offering the degree. The study examined the 2020–21 academic year.

Once management is excluded, economics courses make up an average of 43.4% of the bachelor’s degree. Within these economics courses specifically, mainstream economics account for 86.2% of credits, while “institutionalist” approaches, which encompass non-dominant thought currents, account for the remaining 13.8% [2].

However, this average masks a harsher reality: each year, between 14 and 19 of the 53 universities do not offer their students any institutionalist economics courses, not even optional ones.

These figures cover economics courses alone. The authors then extend the calculation to the degree program as a whole. Here, mainstream economics accounts for 45.8% of credits. A further 35.6% consists of what the authors call “neutral” courses — management, tools and academic study skills. The remaining 18.5% falls outside the mainstream, split between institutionalist economics (9.5%), open disciplinary approaches (5.2%) and reflective courses (3.8%) — the latter being where the Austrian school appears.

As students progress through the program, the share devoted to institutionalist and reflective approaches steadily declines. It stands at 30% of teaching in the first semester, falls to around 15% by the third and fourth semesters, and settles at roughly 14% by the end of the degree. Much of the first-semester provision, moreover, falls under “disciplinary openness”, whose primary purpose is to help students change direction early on, rather than to expose them to other ways of thinking about economics.

More significant still is the marginal place given to “reflective” courses — those that step back from the discipline itself, examining its history, methods and limits. These represent only 3.8% of credits, and their share diminishes further as students specialize.

It is in these courses on the history of economic thought that the Austrian school is generally found — mentioned briefly, as an outdated tradition not worth dwelling on. This makes it difficult to assess how the Austrian approach is taught in French universities: it is rarely named explicitly in course descriptions, so it is hard to know what portion, if any, of that 3.8% it actually covers.

Six universities offer no “reflective” courses in the first year. Twenty-eight — more than half of the 53 — offer none in the second year, and 21 offer none in the third. Economic history and methodology, then, tend to appear as a brief introductory course before disappearing altogether. The further students progress in their studies, the fewer opportunities they are given to question what they are taught.

Orthodox professors dominate economics teaching in France

This 2023 finding builds on other results that had already been made several years earlier by the French Association of Political Economy. The association documented the composition of professor recruitment [3]. Of the 209 professors appointed between 2000 and 2011, 84.2% devoted their research to mainstream economics, the dominant school of thought. The share of heterodox professors — those working in other traditions, such as post-Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) — fell from 18.0% in 2000–05 to 5.0% in 2006–11: a decline of more than two-thirds in a single decade.

It is worth noting, however, that these heterodox economists share the mainstream’s essential method. They reason in terms of aggregates, build formal models and test them against statistical data — the approach that has defined economics since Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall. Their disagreement with the mainstream lies far more in its conclusions than in its method. The Austrian school is different: although it, too, is classified as heterodox, it differs from the other heterodox traditions in almost every respect.

All these professors not only teach; they also direct master’s programs, supervise doctoral theses and sit on the committees that appoint their own successors. Over time, this turns the composition of a faculty into a self-perpetuating in-group.

In Germany, 80% of curricula focus on mainstream economics

This German finding comes from a team at Kassel University: Frank Beckenbach, Maria Daskalakis, and David Hofmann. Their study, financed by the Hans Böckler Foundation, was published in 2016 [4]. The researchers surveyed teaching staff across 54 economics and management programs and analyzed both the module descriptions and the textbooks actually in use. On microeconomics courses, they wrote:

“In microeconomics, for example, in over 80% of the examined courses of study, approaches outside the neoclassical approach are not considered.”

(Beckenbach, Daskalakis and Hofmann, Zur Pluralität der volkswirtschaftlichen Lehre in Deutschland, Metropolis-Verlag, 2016)

In other words, in more than 80% of the programs surveyed, microeconomics teaching never addresses any approach beyond the neoclassical framework.

The German study also uncovers something still more revealing. Its authors analyzed the vocabulary used in module descriptions to assess whether behavioral economics — often presented as an opening of the mainstream to other disciplines, notably sociology and psychology — had genuinely altered the underlying methodology.

They found that such openness rarely amounts to a genuine departure from the dominant paradigm in economics. This is exactly what the first article in this series argued, and what the German study now confirms: what students take to be a choice between rival schools is, in practice, a choice between different branches of the same family of thought.

The study identifies a further mechanism that sustains this uniformity. Course content and textbooks, it finds, reinforce one another: textbooks reflect the curriculum, and the curriculum follows the textbooks, so the whole system locks itself in place. The same authors note, finally, that very few German universities systematically offer courses on the intellectual history of economics, economic ethics or the philosophy of science.

Lastly, half of the teaching staff surveyed consider their students’ complaints about a lack of pluralism to be fundamentally justified. They point to a lack of time, resources and pedagogical support, together with the compulsory nature of the content set out in curriculum structures — which, the researchers write, leaves very little room for more pluralistic approaches.

Only two of twenty British universities are considered pluralist

In 2024, Ross Cathcart and Patrick Nelson published a Rethinking Economics International report [5], examining 20 universities in England, Scotland, and Wales based on student evaluations of these institutions. They concluded:

“Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals. They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.”

(Cathcart and Nelson, Is Economics Education Fit for the 21st Century?, Rethinking Economics International, 2024)

The result is quite clear: of 480 theory modules across 20 universities, 88.3% reflect the dominant school of thought. The report adds that every institution places mainstream economics at the heart of its teaching, with only two exceptions — the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the University of Greenwich — classified as genuinely pluralist. Two universities out of twenty.

Even the University of Oxford does not offer its economics students a course in the history of their own discipline’s thought. For an institution of Oxford’s standing, that omission is telling.

A striking example: the report’s authors also note that ten of the 20 universities require or recommend an advanced level of mathematics for admission, while only one sets any requirement relating to economics itself. This says something about the discipline’s priorities: economics programs appear to demand more of mathematicians prepared to build models than of economists prepared to study economics as a social science in its own right.

This emphasis on mathematics is far from incidental — it perfectly captures the triumph of the Walrasian vision across the discipline. By contrast, economists in the Austrian tradition have never been enthusiastic about the mathematization of economics. In their view, mathematics should not be the core of economic study; it may be useful for analyzing historical and aggregate data, but it is inadequate — even dangerous — as a tool for planning an economy.

On this point, Ludwig von Mises, certainly the greatest of the Austrian economists, was notably averse to the use of mathematics in his work. Rightly, he held that the a priori, axiomatic method was itself scientific, and that the central failing of modern academia was its assumption that all science must be mathematical. As he wrote:

“The mathematical description of various states of equilibrium is mere play. The problem is the analysis of the market process.”

(Mises, Human Action, Scholar’s Edition, Ludwig von Mises Institute, p. 353)

Three studies, one uniform thought

The three studies discussed here do not, in the end, measure quite the same thing: the French study counted credits within economics courses, the German study compared entire curricula, and the British study counted modules that reflect the dominant school of thought. Three distinct methods, then.

Despite these differences, the three teams arrived at the same conclusion by three entirely independent routes. Taken together, these European studies point to a striking uniformity in how economics is taught.

Where are the Austrian strongholds in Europe?

As noted above, the Austrian tradition tends to surface only in courses on the history of economic thought — mentioned when the marginalist revolution of the 1870s is discussed, with Carl Menger cited as a “co-discoverer” of marginal utility, alongside Léon Walras and William Stanley Jevons.

This is precisely the criticism the authors of the British study level at such history courses: they present the discipline’s history as a natural progression towards modern economic theory, as though economics had some inherent purpose — a teleological dimension — that leads logically to today’s dominant framework.

These courses, in other words, offer no invitation to compare the methodological approaches of different schools of thought, still less to question the current orthodoxy of mainstream economics.

Even so, the Austrian school has not entirely vanished from European universities. Several academics remain partly or wholly committed to its methodological approach — among them, in France Jörg Guido Hülsmann at the University of Angers in France and Karl-Friedrich Israel and Olga Peniaz at the Université catholique de l’Ouest (UCO).

In Madrid, the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos even offers a master’s degree in Austrian economics, led since 2007 by Jesús Huerta de Soto [6], whose work was cited in the first article of this series, has directed the program since 2007. The program describes itself as the first, and only, officially recognized course in Europe devoted entirely to the Austrian tradition.

Therefore, a European student can study the Austrian school, but only at one university out of thousands in Europe: the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

The impact of a uniform economics education

Because these students are the future professionals, political decision-makers, economists, senior civil servants, advisers and bankers of tomorrow, one question remains: what becomes of a nation when everyone who governs it has learned economics in exactly the same way, without ever being invited to question its methods? This question is central, because it determines and explains why so many countries today have become structurally incapable of thinking about the economy, the market and society in any other way.

We will take up that question in the next article in this series.

1. Sophie Jallais, Florence Jany-Catrice, Arthur Jatteau, “L'insoutenable manque de pluralisme dans l'enseignement de l'économie à l'université”, AFEP study report, 2023, 160 pages (6,433 courses, 53 public universities, academic year 2020–2021). Also circulated as “De l'absence de pluralisme dans les licences d'économie-gestion en France”. HAL archives: hal-04259486, hal-04313618. ↩
2. In the study cited, institutionalist approaches designate the non-dominant schools of thought that emphasize institutions, history, and power relations (post-Keynesians, régulationnistes, and related currents). The Austrian school is not listed as part of this group in the study. ↩
3. AFEP, “Évolution des recrutements des professeurs de sciences économiques depuis 2000”, September 2013 (assoeconomiepolitique.org). ↩
4. Frank Beckenbach, Maria Daskalakis, David Hofmann, Zur Pluralität der volkswirtschaftlichen Lehre in Deutschland, Metropolis-Verlag, 2016 (EconPLUS study, 54 programs, Hans-Böckler-Stiftung). ↩
5. Ross Cathcart, Patrick Nelson, Is Economics Education Fit for the 21st Century? National Report, Rethinking Economics International, October 2024 (20 universities, 480 theory modules). ↩
6. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Máster en Economía de la Escuela Austríaca, directed by Jesús Huerta de Soto. ↩