Mt. Hebron becoming breeding ground of economics excellence

Two decades ago, Mt. Hebron High School didn’t offer economics classes.

Now, the Ellicott City high school is a three-time consecutive winner of a national economics competition, cementing itself as one of the top institutions for economics education in the country.

Coached by Vann Prime, a social studies teacher at the high school, both divisions of Hebron’s economics teams rose to the top of the 21st National Economics Challenge, which is sponsored by the Council for Economic Education and which was held virtually this year.

The teams competed against  375 other schools across the United States, moving through economics tests at the state and semifinal levels before moving on to the two-round finals. After winning the national competition, Hebron also proceeded to win the international round of the competition.

“Hebron never trailed. I’ve got to be honest, they blew the rest out of the water,” Prime said. “They are unbelievable kids. They have to be self-driven, self-motivated, they’re all so articulate. It’s just incredible.”

At Hebron, new team members are chosen each year via a system that identifies high-performing sophomores using PSAT scores, teacher recommendations and the recommendations of current teammates. Students invited to try out for the team are coached by current team members and take tests to ultimately earn a place on the team.

Graduating seniors Nicholas Snyder and Sudharsan Sundar were the co-captains of this year’s team, and have competed in all three of Hebron’s wins.

For Snyder, the lower division’s win this year was just as significant as his own win in the upper division.

“I think it was a really amazing send off and it was really amazing for the lower division to win because we taught (them) throughout the entire year,” he said.

The NEC finals include a critical thinking presentation round in which six teams that advanced from the semifinals are given 50 minutes to build a presentation weighing the costs and benefits of a policy topic. This year’s was student loan forgiveness — which, coincidentally, Prime had recently taught in class.

The top presentations then move onto the quiz bowl, in which, during in-person competitions, two teams go up against each other, buzzing in to answer questions. During the virtual competitions, three teams play, each having a short amount of time to write their answers on a whiteboard that they then hold up to the screen. The winner of that competition then faces off against international teams.

Snyder said that the most memorable moment of the competition was in that international round; Hebron led the competition by one point for almost the entire round, until the team was presented with one question, surrounding Adam Smith’s beliefs about taxation, that they didn’t know the answer to. The team went with an educated guess and, after several minutes of deliberation from the judges, were the only team to earn the point.

Meanwhile, the moments that stuck the most with Sundar are not the questions that he’d drilled with flashcards or studied for hours. Instead, they were ones that he got on a whim. He’d learned one answer in the quiz bowl round — “featherbedding,” which is when unions require an employer to hire more workers than the need — because he’d randomly decided to read the appendix of one of his textbooks’ chapters.

The school’s principal, Joelle Miller, congratulated the team in a statement to The Daily Record.

“Their achievements are simply astounding. But if you know our students and coach, I’m not surprised at all. Our economics teacher and coach, Mr. Prime, has built one of the most extensive and, objectively, most successful programs in the United States,” she said.

Economics is not a required course at Hebron — or at any Howard County public high school. But when Prime first started teaching at the high school over 15 years ago, he felt that students needed to learn economics to better understand their government classes. Since then, he’s developed an economics program, including AP Macroeconomics and AP Microeconomics, that over 150 students take each year.

“It just took off,” he said. “Very quickly, the class became oversubscribed, within a year or two, and has remained so.”

The program has influenced countless students over the past 15 years; Prime believes that Hebron might be one of the top-producing high schools of college economics majors in the country.

Among those ranks are Snyder and Sundar; both are going on to study economics in college, Snyder at the University of Pennsylvania and Sundar at Stanford, where he also hopes to double major in computer science.

Sundar is planning to pursue either behavioral economics — the psychology of how people make choices — or mechanism design. Meanwhile, Snyder hasn’t decided how he will use his economics education — but he’s excited to see where it takes him.

“What I love so much about economics is that I don’t have to have a specific career path in mind at the moment. Economics, you can apply it to almost any industry out there. You can apply it to engineering, health care, banking, money management, finance,” he said. “Because it’s just the study of how you should make choices … and every industry, every business has to make choices in some way.”