For an increasing number of college students, the utility of studying economics outweighs the opportunity costs of forgoing art history or astrophysics.

In its summer edition, the Journal of Economic Education will publish a paper by Vanderbilt professor John J. Siegfried that finds that more college students are graduating with degrees in economics, continuing a trend of increased enrollments in economics departments since 1996.

After rising 7.7 and 10.5 percent in 2002 and 2003, respectively, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in economics rose 4.7 percent last year, to 16,141 nationally at the 272 colleges Siegfried surveyed.

Siegfried attributed recent increases in the popularity of the economics majornot to a marketplace or political sea change, but to a market readjustment to long-term equilibrium.

“The main reason for the rapid economic growth in the economics major (which actually is not all that rapid...) is a recovery from an abrupt decline of about 30% from 1992-95,” Siegfried wrote in an e-mail.

Two previous studies co-authored by Siegfried, “International Trends in Economics Degrees During the 1990s,” with David K. Round, and “Long-Run Trends in Economics Bachelor’s Degrees,” with Robert A. Margo, investigated fluctuations in the numbers of students majoring in economics and found a link with long-term equilibration rather than short-term changes in or outside academia.

These changes have occurred at the macro level, and are not necessarily common to all individual institutions.

Princeton’s undergraduate department has seen fairly stable enrollment, according to Princeton professor Avinash Dixit, while some other popular humanities and social science majors have seen their number of students fall.

Dixit added that the edge of economics was intellectual, in that it combined a scientific approach with social concerns while also serving as solid preparation for a wide range of careers or advanced fields of studies.

“Economics majors can acquire [analytic and quantitative reasoning] skills without having to commit themselves too early to a specific track, as they would if they majored in business administration (in universities where such an undergraduate major is available) or accountancy or such subjects,” Dixit wrote. “In other words, economics has high ‘option value’ in the process of making a career choice.”

While Dixit emphasized the flexibility of an economics major, Siegfried emphasized that trends in numbers of economics concentrators nationwide do not correlate with the perception that the degree will confer an edge in the job market. His research has not substantiated that the difficulty of finding a job is linked to economics degrees.

“Unemployment rates are pretty low right now, but economics degrees continue to grow. If the cause of the increased interest in economics is a weak job market, I would expect economics enrollments to be slowing about now,” he wrote.

Nor, he added, can it be traced to a long-term strategic shift accompanying globalization. Siegfried did write that economics graduates tend to take jobs in finance, insurance, and real estate, and that because such “FIRE” jobs are often service jobs that are more difficult to send overseas, “there may have been an increase in the relative share of jobs available to economics graduates.”

For many students, economics is the next best thing to an undergraduate business program where no pre-business major exists.

“Of course I cannot deny that at Princeton (and perhaps also at Harvard), some students choose economics as being the closest substitute to a business major they would have really liked to choose,” Dixit wrote.