Emeritus Frederica Shockley

Professor Frederica Shockley, who retired as chair of the Economics Department at Chico State in 2015, reaches out to econ grads and writes their career summaries for this page. 

During the early 1990s she began experimenting with a paperless classroom and she introduced many computing applications into her classes.  She taught her smaller classes in the computer lab.  In 1994, one of her students, John Spade, an economics major, and two of his friends put together a server, Rocko, from leftover parts in the computer lab.  Rocko allowed economics students and faculty to use e-mail and classroom computing applications. 

Professor Shockley used Rocko to develop the first department webpage outside of the College of Engineering, Computer Science & Construction Management (ECC).  She taught microeconomics, managerial economics, urban economics, public finance and the economics of war.  Professor Shockley always emphasized the practical applications of economics, which she used in her consulting with Regional and Economic Sciences, a firm that she jointly owned with her husband, Professor Jon Ebeling.  She often required students to use Excel in order to help prepare them for careers in business. 

Dr. Shockley graduated in 1964 from Ola High School, Ola, Arkansas, one of nineteen graduates.  She completed her BA at Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, Mississippi in three years while working about 30 hours per week as a reporter for the Commercial Dispatch.  After finishing her MA in Economics in 1968 at Mississippi State University, she intended to become a journalist, but her favorite journalism professor, Paul Flowers, encouraged her to become an economics instructor.  In 1978 she received her Ph.D. in economics at Georgia State University and moved to Chico in order to accept a job as an instructor at California State University, Chico.  Professor Shockley served as chair of the Department of Economics from 1987 to 1997 and from 2010 to 2015.