• Degree policy

The EPOG programme will deliver a double diploma. Students will receive a Master’s degree of the University Sorbonne Paris Nord or Université de Paris and the Master’s degree of the university in which they have spent the first year (see Table below). Students will also receive a supplement diploma detailing the acquired knowledge and skills.

List of awarded degrees by option:

Note that the exact names of the degree can change due to local changes in the organisation of the degrees.

Before degrees can be awarded, students must obtain the 120 ECTS (European Credits Transfer System).

For the one-year programme, the EPOG programme delivers a single diploma for Option I, the Master’s degree of the University Sorbonne Paris Nord for Option I, and the degree from University de Paris for Option II.

• Learning Outcomes

The new and innovative feature of EPOG2.0 relies on the dual skill set of expertise it provides:

– an expertise in one of two crucial fields organized as distinct options of the programme and

– a wide and “systemic” understanding of economic policies.

– It also relies on the integration of these issues in a global context. Students can benefit from the expertise of a regional player – Wits (for Africa) – and global players (the Agence française de développement, AFD).

This integrative approach enables EPOG graduates to deal with the complex and systemic dimensions of economic policies, in line with the needs of public or private institutions. To do so, EPOG combines these two major areas that are usually kept isolated, deals with different economics areas, and develops pluralistic (including interdisciplinary) perspectives, which are often underrepresented in your typical Master’s programme in Economics. Focused on enabling its graduates to analyze the role and interdependencies among public policies in these fields, EPOG graduates end up prepared to rethink macroeconomic, financial, industrial, and development policies in a period of crisis. This original “systemic” approach is built on both the expertise acquired by students in one of the two fields as well as the cross-cutting courses and group work between options. This innovative framework yields promising learning outcomes, including both the specific expertise in one field and the capacity to understand and deal with the interdependencies with the other field.

Besides the above, at the end of the two-year programme, students should have a critical awareness of all the problems related to globalization and the ecological transition. They should be able to provide informed and fair assessments of the various solutions to these problems that are being proposed by various advocacy groups or various schools of thought in economics. Without necessarily being themselves econometricians, they should be able to provide a judicious diagnostic on statistical or econometric work which is being offered to defend one or another solution or proposal. They should be able to work on complex and varied issues, and to do so working within a team of other researchers with different opinions and different backgrounds. They should be able to present their own views in a clear and succinct manner, and reply to objections in a firm but diplomatic way. Our past experience has shown that many of our students at the end of their two-year programme demonstrate their ability to put forth original hypotheses and powerful ideas, which go beyond restating or reproducing past knowledge.

• Academic opportunities and employability

The EPOG consortium takes into account the needs of future employers by:

– Putting a strong emphasis on research-based activities and networking, since a significant part of the EPOG students consider a professional career as researcher (whether in public or private institutions).

– Encouraging students to take initiatives and develop their entrepreneurial spirit. Student initiatives are further expanding networking opportunities: two of the EPOG students have founded the international Youth Scholars Initiative (YSI) working group on “innovation” of the INET (Institute for New Economic Thinking) before graduating in July 2016. This working group has already organised international workshops and conferences. Students have also participated in the creation and management of the “International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics” (ISIPE) as a coalition of 82 universities from more than 30 countries. They are also involved in Rethinking Economics or other such student organizations lobbying for more pluralism in economics education like OIKOS, based in Switzerland.

– Preparing EPOG students to be competitive for employment by encouraging them to participate in professional meetings and academic conferences, in acknowledging student contributions to research presented at conferences, and in some cases in enticing the students to revise and submit the results of or a part of their master’s thesis to a scholarly journal. During the fourth semester, students are also trained to present their thesis proposals to admission committees, when such committees require an oral presentation.

The results of the EPOG Alumni Survey which was conducted in the Fall of 2017 may provide us with the best information regarding the employability of EPOG graduates. Among the graduates that were not still studying, only 5 out of 34 were still looking for a job, but 3 of those had received job offers but had declined them because either they did not fit their expectations or because they were in an undesired geographic location. 89% of the students who had a job expressed the view that their current job was very well, well or pretty well related to their field of occupation. 93% of those with a job found that the EPOG programme had been either very useful or useful for getting their position. 68% of these graduates found their job within three months of graduation, and 92% were either very satisfied or satisfied with their current job. All these statistics are a testimony to the usefulness and success of the EPOG programme. When one goes into the detailed information, the range of jobs acquired by these graduates is quite impressive: some work in central banks (ECB, Spain, Nicaragua), others for the private sector, such as financial institutions or Mercedes-Benz, some work for NGOs or public authorities or international organizations such as the United Nations. Some former EPOG students even work for the European Commission.