The Disequilibrium of Academic Research: Ashoka University and Its Not-So-Liberal-Arts Economics Department

Four years of majoring in Economics at Ashoka has made the process of meeting someone for the first time a well-oiled machine — a meek “I’m an Econ major (sorry),” met with an immediate grimace, followed by a very quick “I’m not like those Econ majors, though,” (read: “I’m not a consulting/business/finance dude-bro”). The conversation surrounding Economics, Ashoka’s largest academic department, seems ubiquitous. Every friend group inevitably has at least one Economics major, to the point where the entire student body is painfully aware of the next Statistics for Economics examination. 

Engagement with the discipline, though, seems more fissured than in other departments. A comparatively small group of students are committed to Economics for the sake of the subject itself, and are interested in academia. An overwhelming majority, however, view the classes as a tribulation that will eventually lead to a well-paying job that barely has anything to do with the subject. 

The culture surrounding Economics at Ashoka has been bastardised into something adjacent to a corporate space—surprising for a liberal-arts university that prides itself on its academic rigour and research output. If students interested in entrepreneurship, finance, business, and consulting are all grouped into the broad umbrella category of ‘Economics,’ it begs the question: Why is Economics at Ashoka so alienated from more academic pursuits, especially in the context of its liberal arts principles? 

In an attempt to answer this question, I spoke to two members of the student body, both majoring in Economics. For Roshni Sen* (UG’28), the subject was a ‘default’ option in pursuit of a high placement package. While initially open to the idea of shopping around for different majors, a heavy course-load and a long list of pre-requisite courses meant she had to quickly declare her major if she wanted to graduate on time. “Even though I made the decision to come to a liberal arts college so I could explore, you need to do so many pre-reqs that you have to commit soon.” Committing to these prerequisites is only the start of an Economics major’s troubles: the famously competitive registration process requires students to compete with senior batches for a seat in required courses. 

Roshni was lucky enough to get all the courses she pre-registered for but had only opted in for her second-choice professors in some cases, pre-empting the registration rush. Neha Maniar (UG’26) and Saumya Chopra (UG’26), this year’s Economics Student Representatives, have clarified that while the department is aware of this semesterly complaint, it is unlikely that further action will be taken as long as students get seats in their respective compulsory courses; preferences for particular faculty members, meanwhile, are not a priority. 

When choice in courses is a large part of the university’s branding for prospective applicants—setting the institution apart from more traditionally-structured colleges in India—taking this choice away renders a primary form of engagement with the department null and void.  First-year courses, in particular, are bloated, with a typical Introduction to Economics class having nearly 90 students. While you are sold an idyllic version of personalised attention and academic discourse via the Socratic method, this is seldom the case in compulsory classes. “If it's such a big classroom, nobody cares what you're doing… the liberal arts ethos has sort of been changed and sacrificed for efficiency in every way possible,” says Roshni, reiterating that first-year classes rarely spark any interest in the subject. 

Four semesters of dense prerequisites that rely on examinations and quizzes means that in the usual Economics trajectory, a student cannot get a taste of research in the discipline until their third year, by which time they would have already begun exploring other career options that are well-supported by the clubs and societies, as well as the Entrepreneurship department. For those who do end up in academia, their interests are developed either through personal initiative or by some external exposure. For Jayati Gupta, a second-year MA Economics student who also completed her undergraduate degree in Economics at Ashoka in 2023, it was the latter. 

With no family members who had pursued post-graduate education, Jayati lacked any immediate reference for what a career in academia looks like. It was during her Microeconomic Theory II class with Professor Abhinash Borah that she began taking an interest in her major. Professor Borah’s generosity in class, with the way he responded to doubts while pushing people to think on their own, was the first catalyst for Jayati to enjoy Economics, especially through the reading groups and seminar events he encouraged her to attend and volunteer for. More than the course material, it was this community that she found herself a part of that inspired her to return for the Master’s programme at Ashoka. “My friends, both Econ majors and otherwise, were very interested in academia and the research that they were doing; the papers they were writing; the courses they were taking, and they would often talk about their own work, and talking to them made me like my major more.” 

Unfortunately, Ashoka’s Economics department does not do a good job of creating such a community, by itself. The weekly seminars, where invited researchers present their latest work, are the department’s most regular events in a semester.  The marketing emails for these do not go out to the entire student body and many juniors are unaware that they are hosted at all. According to Jayati, the seminars by design are also inaccessible to most students, jointly due to the level of technical knowledge required to understand the presentations, and the awkward lunch-hour timing. “If I just went to these seminars, honestly, as a second year, or even as a third year for the most part, I would just be scared, afraid, and unwilling to go again.”

A case can be made for these seminars being meant for the faculty members, especially since quantitative research in Economics can seldom be simplified for an undergraduate audience. What is inexcusable, however, is a similar inaccessibility being found in student research, particularly the ASP capstone theses. As a third-year student considering writing a thesis, I was eager to attend the end-semester thesis presentations for the ASP'24 batch, only to later discover that I had missed the event since the invitation email had only been sent to the other ASPs. The student representatives are unaware of the criteria for being included in these mailing lists, but informing the student body of such events does not seem to be a concern for the department. Having been thrown in the deep end and asked to formulate a research proposal from scratch to be submitted in a month, I had no idea what sort of research was even expected of a typical undergraduate thesis, and not being invited to the presentation only worsened this confusion.

I was fortunate to have a wonderfully supportive thesis advisor who guided me through the intricacies of developing a research question. For the most part, though, students are cut off from others conducting research in their midst, either through the absence of any formalised interactions through a regular thesis workshop, for instance—a staple in other departments—or by not attending the capstone presentations of the senior batches, making the process all the more daunting. 

From the 2025–26 academic year, the Economics department has also introduced a 3.6 CGPA cutoff for students pursuing the research track, under the new NEP guidelines. When an experience is as rarefied and exclusive as research, it is the responsibility of the academic department of a research-focused university to take the necessary steps and encourage students to explore the same. It is worth noting that the Economics department already has a fairly low proportion of students taking on a thesis in their fourth year; in the 2024–25 academic year, both Economics and Sociology & Anthropology, for instance, have 15 students writing a thesis. This is surprising, considering that the former is the largest department in the university while the latter is relatively small, and the increasing restrictions to pursue undergraduate research will only reduce these numbers. 

In the lack of internal support from the department, students look to their clubs and societies for external engagement with the discipline. The Ashoka University Economics Society (AUES), Ashoka’s largest academic society,  is the principal organisation for this role. Making Economics more “accessible, intersectional, and fun” was one of the primary motivations for kickstarting Equilibrium, the society’s annual Economics inter-collegiate fest, says co-Vice President Gaurika Adukia (UG’26). Highlighting Ashoka’s liberal arts approach to the subject has been vital for co-President Prithvi Bapna (UG’26) as well, especially in comparison to other colleges in the Delhi-NCR region. A majority of the Equilibrium budget is spent on organising talks and competitions, as opposed to the more ‘cultural’ aspects of the fest, such as the stalls or the musical performance. During the rest of the year, the Seminars vertical, the AUES blog, and the Ashoka University Economic Review (AUER) cater to the academic needs of the discipline. Co-President Gareema Goel (UG’26) adds that the events at Equilibrium are designed to interest a diverse audience: “Between the academic events, social events, mixers, and even the cultural performance at the end, every person will enjoy something.”

Whether AUES succeeds in its goal is a different matter. Just as the Economics major becomes synonymous with Entrepreneurship and consulting, the events hosted by AUES are often indistinguishable from those organised by the Business Club, the Consulting Club, and the Entrepreneurship Weekender. Equilibrium, for instance, included several competition collaborations with these clubs, involving stock market investing, business strategy, and venture capital pitching. The different clubs and societies involved with aspects of business and finance have begun crystallising into a singular entity and AUES is no exception to this phenomenon, shaping the culture of Economics at Ashoka to prioritise the corporate space, and exclude academic research. Roshni and Jayati found themselves dissatisfied with the society; during her short stint as a member near the end of her third year, Jayati found no real “community” in the society, while Roshni criticised its narrow scope. “They do have a lot of industry professionals that come for talks, but it's very focused on getting a consulting picture, rather than the actual subject.” 

“I will say I don't blame them because it's not their job. It's the job of the department to get you interested in research, not them,” Jayati points out. As it stands, though, the department does not seem to consider this a priority. Nor can individual faculty members like Borah be expected to step in effectively if the admissions team continues to admit exponentially larger batch sizes each year. 

Garnering an interest in rigorous, academic research has been left to the invisible hand of students’ proclivities and their peer groups, but in an institution that boasts of its liberal arts ethos, the Economics department itself must play an active role in this process. If mandatory classes are close to bursting with nearly a hundred students, smaller, informal peer groups and research communities are the only channels for fostering any interest in the subject beyond pivoting to a corporate job. As Jayati rightly puts it, “There’s definitely an element of having to take your own initiative and scope out opportunities. But the thing is, when there's a hundred people, how many times can you take an initiative to be remembered?”

* The student’s name has been changed to maintain anonymity. 

(Edited by Giya Sood and Srijana Siri Murthy)