Economics

welcome to the economics department
Economics is the study of how people choose to use scarce resources to produce goods and services and how they make allocation decisions to satisfy their wants.
In pursuing the Associate in Arts in Economics for Transfer degree, students acquire skills in analyzing problems using sound reasoning to make decisions.
Do you ever wonder why food costs rise when gas prices spike?
Have you ever questioned why U.S. politicians worry when other countries talk of going bankrupt?
Did you ever wonder why you can’t get a good interest rate on your savings account?
All of these phenomena can be explained through economics. Economics is the study of the production and consumption of goods and the transfer of wealth to produce and obtain those goods. Economics explains how people interact within markets to get what they want or accomplish certain goals. Since economics is a driving force of human interaction, studying it often reveals why people and governments behave in particular ways.
Economics Program
Student Learning Outcomes
- Understand the laws of demand and supply, and apply macroeconomic models to describe the economy.
- Explain the concepts of economic resources, scarcity, opportunity cost, rational behavior and elasticity.
- Understand our mixed capitalist system and the national output (GDP).
- Analyze how monetary and fiscal policy impacts the economy.
- Explain how markets function and the role of the government into the economy.
- Understand market structures in the United States, and to demonstrate how consumers try to maximize utilities and firms attempt to maximize profit.
Department Contact
- Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts Division
- 408-288-3785
- HSSA@sjcc.edu