About this guide.
An independent, plain-English guide to the Harvard International Economics Essay Competition — what it is, who runs it, and how to read this site alongside the official sources.
A clear map to a competitive contest.
HIEEC is a real opportunity with a high bar and a short word limit, and most of the questions students and parents ask are practical: what do the prompts actually ask, how is the writing judged, who can enter, and when. This guide answers those questions in one place and links back to the organisers for anything official.
We are not the contest and we do not run it. We are an independent education team that follows HIEEC closely and writes about it for an international audience. Everything here is drawn from publicly available information published by the organisers and reputable sources; we tell you which cycle a date or prompt belongs to, and we point you to HUEA before you act.
If you are deciding whether to enter, start with the competition format and the essay topics, then use the resources to prepare. If something here looks out of date, treat the official HUEA channels as the source of truth.
Who is behind HIEEC
The contest
The Harvard International Economics Essay Competition — HUEA’s autumn essay contest for high-school students, with four prompts and a 1,500-word limit. See the format.
The organiser
The Harvard Undergraduate Economics Association — a student organisation at Harvard that runs competitions, a speaker series, and outreach, and organises HIEEC.
The review
The Harvard College Economics Review — Harvard’s undergraduate economics publication, which can publish award-winning HIEEC essays.
How we keep this accurate
Contest details change every year — prompts are rewritten, dates shift, and caps can close a window early. So we are deliberate about how we present information. We date everything: when we cite a deadline or a prompt, we say which cycle it belongs to, and we flag when the next cycle has not yet been announced. We do not present a past deadline as if it were upcoming.
We rely on the organisers and reputable sources, and we avoid publishing numbers we cannot verify. When a new cycle opens, we update the relevant pages. And we keep the independent framing visible — on the home page, here, and in the footer — so no reader mistakes this guide for the official contest.
Questions about HIEEC?
Ask us about the prompts, the format, eligibility, or preparation — we’ll point you to the right resources and the official sources.