ABSTRACT
The graduate school experience plays an important role in determining economic discourse; it certifies economists as professionals; it establishes economists' view of argumentation and guides them as to what is important to study and what is not. To understand economic discourse one should have a good sense of the professionalization of economists that occurs in graduate school. The typical graduate student in economics at the selected institutions is a twenty-six-year-old, middle-class, nonreligious white male who is involved in a long-term relationship. Students come into graduate school wanting economics to be relevant and are taught theory and techniques that point out the complexity of the problems. There is a significant variety of opinions among graduate economics students and among the schools in the survey, and there definitely seems to be a Chicago school of economics. There are also tensions between the emphasis on techniques and the desire to do policy-oriented work.
