Sterling was the worst performing currency in the world last month. An employment tribunal ruled against Uber drivers being classified as self-employed. October brought with it the first GDP figures since the Brexit vote, which were better than expected. All while the ratings agency Moody’s threatened to downgrade Britain’s credit status if it leaves the European single market.

You would think that the next generation of economists were ready with a range of models and tools to analyse and make sense of these events. But the limitations of a standard undergraduate economics education are such that few can honestly say they are prepared for the task.

To illustrate the point, a review of 172 economics modules at seven UK universities showed that only 22% of exam marks required students to illustrate any critical or independent thinking and this dropped to 6.7% for compulsory modules.

It is not an overstatement to say that economics students can go through their entire degree without once being asked to express an opinion. This neglect of critical thought and independent judgment is at odds with what employers of economics graduates need and what citizens expect from the experts responsible for the health of their economy.

Highlighting the problem in economics departments across the UK is the new book The Econocracy, with a foreword by the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane.

It has been four years since economics students in the UK started to call for reform to their economics education. We were a generation that came of age during the chaos of the 2008 global financial crisis and we were shocked by how little the problems of the real world intruded on the abstract picture of the economy described in our classrooms.

Frustration led us to set up societies with names like the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism and Manchester’s Post-Crash Economics Society. We called for an education with more critical thinking, real world context, history and “pluralism”: exposing students to contrasting economic frameworks (feminist, Austrian, post-Keynesian) to give them a range of ways to think about the economy and allow them to judge which are best at answering different economic questions.

We set up the network Rethinking Economics, which now connects 45 groups across the world and 16 in the UK.

The good news then is that universities are beginning to change. Manchester has brought in new modules on economic policy and financial crises and Cambridge has introduced a new module on economic history. Some universities including Greenwich, Goldsmiths and Kingston have gone even further and are fully reforming their curricula. These are major achievements and they illustrate that there is widespread agreement that economics education must be better.

This doesn’t mean our campaign is over though; only that the fault lines have shifted. Pretty much everyone now agrees that an economics education must include more history, critical thinking and engagement with the real world. However, the call for pluralism – possibly the most important aspect of our campaign - is still rejected by most universities. Economics education currently teaches only one perspective, neoclassical economics: of the 172 module course outlines we analysed, only 17 mentioned alternative perspectives. Tomorrow’s economists are taught that neoclassical economics provides the single correct and universal explanation of how the economy functions.

Opening up economics, by giving the next generation of economists a pluralist education, will provide crucially needed tools to address the challenges we face as a society. Every other social science acknowledges the need for pluralism. Refusing to do the same in economics is restricting our collective ability to build healthy and prosperous societies and we are all poorer for it.

Signed by:

Gina Kolbe, Aberdeen Political Economy Group

Bruno Roberts, Real World Economics at Bristol

Jacob Gibbs, Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism

Bartosz Radomski, Edinburgh University Society for Economic Pluralism

Iva Parvanova, Glasgow University Real World Economics Society

Samiah Anderson, New School Economics Goldsmiths

Liam Cordrey, Greenwich Pluralism in Economics

Shanice Lewis-Spencer, Kingston University Rethinking Economics

Carlo Corbani, Open Economics Leeds

Jack Hughes, Post-Crash Economics Society Manchester

Daniel Moseley, Newcastle Economics Society

Max Schroder, Rethinking Economics Oxford

Isaac Stovell, Alternative Economics Society Sheffield

Peter Andreas Nielsen, Open Economics Forum SOAS

Eva-Maria Egger, Pluralist Economics at Sussex

Joel Christoph, Better Economics UCL