ABSTRACT
Students could take graduate courses by correspondence in the comfort of their homes. But if one assumes that economists and their students are rational, they apparently gain from talking with each other face to face. The conversations revealed that graduate students are experiencing an identity crisis—a conflict between their idea of what an economist is and the identity that their graduate training imposes. The Chicago students seem to take exception to the preoccupation with the empirical and the relevant in economics. The contrast that the numbers bring to light is that between Chicago students on one side and all the other students on the other. The frustrations of non-Chicago students concern especially the discrepancy between what they expected from economics and what they found. The students have their eyes set on the "real world," where policy matters and where people have psychological and sociological dimensions.
