Economics educators generally agree that opportunity cost and price mechanism are economic threshold concepts. If we assess students’ higher order thinking in the academic context, we would expect a strong association between students’ demonstrated ability of applying threshold concepts in real life context and their academic achievement. In this interview study, no such association was observed. The paper argues that current economics education over-emphasises the acquisition of technical skills, at the expense of integrative understanding, resulting in the observed lack of real world relevance by economics students and contributing to the continuous decline in economics enrollment in Australian universities.

经济学教育者普遍同意，机会成本和价格机制是经济学的门槛概念。如果我们在学术背景下评估学生的高阶思维，我们期望学生在现实生活中运用阈值概念的示范能力与他们的学业成绩之间有很强的联系。在本访谈研究中，未观察到这种关联。该论文认为，当前的经济学教育过分强调技术技能的获取，却以综合理解为代价，导致观察到经济学专业的学生缺乏与现实世界的相关性，并导致澳大利亚大学的经济学入学率持续下降。