Note 156. “Economics Education: Still Teaching Excel Like It’s 1999…”

Dr. Olga D. Khon

These days, when nearly everyone has at least heard of automation — whether in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) or, more broadly, IT-driven processes - one naturally expects higher education to keep pace with students’ demand for contemporary knowledge. Economics and finance are no exception.

Imagine, then, a course in economics or finance where each student is required to complete the same project in Microsoft Excel. In practice, this means manually filling dozens of spreadsheets while relying only on the most elementary features of the program: formulas for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, accompanied by a handful of basic functions such as summation, conditionals, and rounding. Tutors then proceed to check these spreadsheets one by one, cell by cell. Afterward, moderators repeat almost the same ritual — reviewing every cell in every sheet of every student’s file.

Meanwhile, students are taught none of Excel’s more advanced capabilities: no pivot tables, no macros, and certainly no VBA programming.

At first glance, given the sheer amount of time devoted to this painstaking manual checking, the process might appear weighty, even indispensable.

In reality, however, the opposite is true. This laborious, time-consuming cycle of task completion and grading — stretching over weeks, sometimes months — feels hopelessly outdated in 2026. Ironically, the very tool designed for automation ends up being verified by humans. It is clear that both the assignments and the teaching content are in urgent need of modernisation, with far greater use of automation.

We live in a world where advanced IT and AI-driven automation are rapidly permeating countless fields, and literacy in programming languages and AI engineering is becoming essential knowledge for every economist and financier.