Stephen Conroy’s unconventional academic journey

Stephen Conroy, Ph.D., the current associate dean for undergraduate programs, professor of economics, and recipient of multiple research and teaching awards, is an advocate for student success

Zoe Harvey / Contributor / The USD Vista

Professor, associate dean, writer, researcher — you name it, and Stephen Conroy has probably done it. However, his career in academia wasn’t what he had originally expected. Conroy had plans to go the pre-med or pre-dental route when he began his college career at Creighton University in 1983, eventually deciding on pre-dental. He applied to four schools and got accepted into each one. Just like every major, there are prerequisites students must take. In Conroy’s case, it was an economics course.

“I loved it from the first day of class,” he said. 

He loved it enough to take another class by the same professor. Conroy wanted to be an orthodontist but because being in the top 5% of his class to be accepted into orthodontics postdocs was a difficult task, he decided going into business would be the best alternative route.

Conroy spent two years in Kansas City doing inventory control for Hallmark Cards. In 1989, he spent four months at a Trappist Monastery in Missouri before another two months in the Dominican Republic. As exciting as all of this traveling was, Conroy then decided to settle in Los Angeles where he worked with Angel’s Flight, a Catholic Charities organization for homeless children for a year and a half.

He began working with low-income individuals, mostly immigrants, with El Centro del Pueblo, a non-profit community service agency. This was made possible by his ability to speak Spanish and communicate with people who could only speak that language. However, Conroy soon began to re-evaluate everything he was doing.

“Frustrated personally, I felt like yeah, I’m making a difference, I’m helping people, but I would really like to understand the questions of poverty and immigration on a much deeper level and see if I can affect policy,” he said. 

He decided to pursue his education further. Living near McArthur Park in Los Angeles made the University of Southern California the most convenient school to attend. 

“The McArthur Park neighborhood was kind of a dangerous place in the early 90s, but I also really enjoyed being with people in a difficult situation because I wanted to help them,” Conroy said.

Attending the University of Southern California, Conroy added an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics to his B.A. in Economics from Creighton. Although Conroy wanted to make use of his new knowledge and degrees at policy-affecting research institutes, being a graduate assistant altered his plans. Everything he thought he was called to do had become a distant memory. 

“The minute I set foot in front of a classroom my life changed,” Conroy said.
Conroy’s experience as a head teaching assistant (TA) for Richard Easterlin fueled his passion to teach. It also played a role in obtaining his first teaching job at the University of West Florida. Conroy loved everything about teaching. He enjoyed engaging with students, talking about the subjects he was interested in, and the positive feedback he received from students. 

Conroy got permission from his mentors to use their notes as a foundation for his Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics courses. He has adapted his notes every year since and has even created his own mnemonic devices — PIPTE and TIPSE, for things that will shift a demand or supply curve. He found that mnemonic devices were very helpful in simplifying economics for students because the subject is so complex. He wants to create boundaries and focus on the most important parts of economics students need to know. 

“I felt like I had a gift to take complex information, or theories, or processes, and boil them down to information that undergraduate business students could understand,” Conroy said.

Conroy focused on teaching from 1999 to 2012. He was then presented with new opportunities to engage with students in different ways, especially once he joined the faculty of University of San Diego in 2004. In 2012, Conroy became the faculty director of the Center of Peace and Commerce. Three years later he was offered the position of an administrator. 

Then, as if those positions and teaching were not enough, in 2015 Conroy took on the challenge to be the associate dean in the USD School of Business. He wanted to have an impact on student success from an administrative position even if it meant teaching less.

His goal is to set students up to be successful, not set students up to fail. For example, he has tried to improve academic advisors’ ability to communicate what courses students need to take for their intended majors. He enjoys designing policies that are student centric, working with people, supervising, and creating teams composed of people that are just as passionate about student success. 

However, regardless of these newfound interests and commitments, Conroy’s heart remains with teaching.

“I’ve taught at least 3 classes a year because I love it,” he said. “Teaching is my first love.” 

Conroy has won several research and teaching awards at USD. In 2018, Conroy was ranked as a Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor by Poets & Quants. His research outside of the classroom flourished as well. “Business Ethics and Religion: Religiosity as a Predictor of Ethical Awareness among Students” is one paper that Conroy and his Baylor colleague published. According to Google Scholar, it has over five hundred citations today in papers and books regarding business ethics or religiosity.

In addition, Conroy researched the Latino Paradox. According to Conroy, there was a puzzle as to why there did not appear to be many Latinos in the homeless samples. Conroy used his advantage in working closely with Hispanic immigrants in Los Angeles and knowledge in economics to solve it.

A researcher hypothesized that this disparity was due to strong family ties; however Conroy took another perspective in his research to explain the struggles Latinos experiencing homelessness face beyond money. He acknowledged that their fears of seeking out traditional homeless outreach programs extended to their struggles with language barriers and concerns about citizenship. Conroy’s papers on the Latino Paradox influenced how individuals experiencing homelessness are counted in Los Angeles.

Conroy’s path to currently serving as USD’s associate dean for undergraduate business programs and as a professor of economics has been anything but a straight line. In his quest to work with immigrants in L.A., he found another passion — teaching college students economics. No matter what new challenge or opportunity Conroy decides to take on, teaching will always be his favorite thing to do. 

“I love it. It’s my jam.”