Econ from a target school opens Wall Street doors — analyst roles at Goldman, JPM, Bridgewater, Citadel pay $100k+ straight out of undergrad. Consulting recruits heavily. Tech companies increasingly hire econ grads for data science and product analytics. The analytical training is durable and respected across industries.

The "Economist" BLS title requires a PhD — 5–7 years of grad school. A bachelor's alone gets you into research-assistant, policy-analyst, and business-analyst roles at $55–80k. Rigor varies massively by school — a BA in econ at a mid-tier school can be indistinguishable from a general business degree in the job market.

Top-target econ → IB/consulting ($110–150k starting, +bonus) is the highest-pay undergrad outcome outside of CS. Data science is the fastest-growing lane (+33%). Academic/policy path requires PhD and pays $115k median with much lower variance. Pair econ with stats or CS to unlock the quant-heavy high-paying lanes.

AI is eating the bottom of the analyst pyramid — data pulls, standard reports, basic memos. What survives: causal inference, policy evaluation, experiment design, economic modeling at the PhD level — and increasingly, building AI systems that understand human preferences (tech companies hire PhDs for this). Good econ training still pays.