> which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful?
Are you saying that the "Railroad Practice" elective is directly comparable to the "Corporate Finance" elective of today?
If anything, I'd say that Railroad Practice is best compared to "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" in that they're both focused on some of the biggest economic facilitators of their respective days, rail and data science. And Harvard's other electives seem similarly tailored, allowing people to get a grasp of fields of practice that can yield them a substantial advantage in practice, e.g in leveraging globalization or serving underserved markets.
Your other points aren't comparative to the Harvard of the day but rather speculative ("a puny fraction" and its suggested impact), so there's not much I can do to speak to them.
---
Tangent: it'd be an interesting analytic exercise to compare courses and curricula year by year and see what percentage of electives have generalized, what percentage have specialized, and to get a better grasp of how a school's programs are both adapting to and anticipating current and future economics landscapes.
It's a good course (I had mentees who took it)
A pure Econ degree doesn't put you on management or leadership tracks in most companies.
Most are practitioners who were sponsored by their employer to attend an MBA, or were recruited out of college for an LDP (eg. Abbvie and UIUC CS/Biotech, Danaher and CMU MechE, P&G and CMU/UMich/OSU/UIUC ChemE/MechE).
The employment stats you provided aren't anymore different from similar peer programs with an Engineering bias like UC Berkeley [0], UCLA [1], or UW [2].
Finance, High Tech, and Consulting are always the trifecta for high paying white collar jobs no matter which program you attend.
I think you have this weird notion or stereotype that it's only "HAHVAD" grad that run the world like an evil cabal. In reality, there are plenty of equally selective public schools with similar outcomes and that have a similar impact (eg. The ones I listed above).
[0] - https://career.berkeley.edu/employers/learn-about-the-campus...
"The majority — 58 percent — of Harvard’s graduating class will immediately enter the workforce, and more than half will take jobs in finance, tech, or consulting..." - https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey/after-har...
And look at their current Economics electives -
https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e...
- which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful?
And Harvard's own numbers here - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-award... - suggest that that "fairly decent" engineering program is a puny fraction of the undergraduate population. And maybe has a pretty poor RoI on its Harvard-sized tuition, given that Harvard feels the need to argue that prospective applicants shouldn't just ignore it, in favor of well-known engineering programs, because "community and location": https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/why...