“As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake.” —Ludwig von Mises
Inspired in part by an unsuccessful plan in 1949 to create a Liberal Institute under the leadership of Ludwig von Mises at the University of Chicago, a newly created Mises Institute Graduate School welcomed its first cohort of master’s degree students in August of 2020. It has since admitted three additional student cohorts and is now accepting applications for its Fall 2022 cohort.
Available completely online, the program is seeking applicants with specific plans to put their soon-to-be-acquired knowledge to productive use. Students upon graduation will be well-suited to work in career areas beyond academia as the program was designed to also prepare public policy analysts, those with entrepreneurial aspirations, finance professionals, businesspeople, and public interest lawyers who have secured or will secure their law degrees elsewhere.
Although the program requires a sixteen- to nineteen-hour weekly commitment and requires student adherence to weekly submission deadlines, asynchronous online delivery of the coursework allows considerable flexibility for students with work and familial obligations. Because the vast majority of the tuition, books, and other program expenses are funded by the Institute’s private donors, most students are on a pay-as-they-go basis and will complete the entire program debt-free. The program’s low tuition price for students is not, however, the primary reason that students have opted for the Institute’s master of arts program. Rather, it is the uniqueness of an economics program that is 100 percent Austrian school, taught exclusively by the nation’s foremost Austrian school professors and scholars.
Already the program is producing some of the strongest students in the Austrian tradition. Last July, an Institute’s graduate student won the Douglas E. French Prize for finishing first in that competition’s grueling written and oral exams. Mises Institute graduate students authored six of the papers presented at the 2022 Austrian Economics Research Conference covering topics such as inflation, finance, and entrepreneurship. Contributions from Graduate Program students are currently being published in academic journals, the Mises Wire, and other popular outlets.
The program’s required coursework includes Microeconomics, Monetary Economics, Quantitative Economics: Uses and Limitations, Macroeconomics, and History of Economic Thought I and II. Electives include Economic Regulation and Crises, Comparative Economic Systems, and the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. To graduate and be awarded the MA in Austrian economics, each student is also required to write and defend a master’s thesis suitable for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Although a Mises Institute graduate school of economics was a long-held vision of both Dr. Ludwig von Mises and Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, until 2019 the Mises Institute had been heavily focused on providing support to students of other educational institutions. One such student, Joseph Becker, provost, has been the administrative head of the Institute’s new graduate school since its inception. Prior to assuming his post as provost, Becker completed his graduate degree in economics under the tutelage of Drs. Murray N. Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and after receiving his JD, practiced public interest, constitutional law in state and federal courts. The program’s academic vice president, Dr. Joseph T. Salerno, a longtime professor at Pace University in New York, has served as academic vice president of the Mises Institute since 2010. Further contributing to the excellence of the program are the program’s highly qualified and outstanding faculty members who are carefully selected PhDs who have lectured or taught at Mises Institute scholarly conferences and published in its journals, books, and online publications.
As members of the Institute’s first graduate cohort prepare to grace the stage at the graduate school’s July commencement ceremony in Auburn, Alabama, the Institute looks forward to welcoming its fall 2022 cohort.
