The statistics department needs help now. Following a national trend, the statistics department is having trouble retaining both faculty and staff, and as a result, the quality of statistics instruction in the department as a whole is suffering. Students ultimately are being forced to absorb this suffering.
Since statistics students' levels of mathematical experience are evenly distributed year to year, and current faculty turnover is high, this suggests a diminishment in the quality of teaching.
Granted, students take statistics courses outside the statistics department, such as in the psychology and economics departments. Statistics courses taught within the statistics department, though, prove crucial for hundreds of students in several areas of study each year. The Pre-Commerce program requires that students take STAT 112, one of the most popular courses in the statistics department. Mathematics majors, as well as those seeking statistics minors, must complete a number of statistics courses. Thus, quality control of instruction is vital.
Yet the current problem is not the quality of the instructors in the statistics department. Rather, there simply is not enough support to take care of necessary day-to-day business. Statistics faculty are being reduced to basic secretarial work and taking on unwieldy course loads.
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This is due to fewer numbers of graduate students nationwide entering statistics. This, combined with strict oversight of basic searching for faculty, puts the statistics department in a bind of limited resources and narrow ability to obtain more resources. These difficulties come in addition to teaching other smaller classes, committee memberships, helping students outside of class, doing their own research, guiding student research, reporting to deans, helping search for other faculty and spending time with their families and colleagues.
Statistics department head Don Richards says the lack of interest in statistics begins in elementary school. Young American students do not receive specialized education focusing upon mathematics and science as much as their European counterparts, for example. Additionally, standards for mathematics and science generally are lower in the United States than elsewhere. Students are pushed away from mathematics early on, compared with other "non-number" subjects. By the time they reach university or graduate level work, they aren't as attracted to mathematics or statistics programs.
The University follows this trend. There are only 11 students in the graduate statistics program, three of whom were born outside the United States. Additionally, the attrition rate for graduate statistics work is high: Two-thirds of those who enroll in the program don't complete it.
Furthermore, jobs for graduate students in statistics in the private sector tend to be more attractive than those in academia. Larger corporations are able to provide these graduates with living stipends, high starting salaries, and help in searching for a home and schooling for children. These are things that academia has neither the time nor the resources to provide. The end result is a vicious cycle: low retention of motivated and intelligent statistics students and high turnover in academia, leading to a diminishment in quality of instruction, which further drives students away from statistics.
Again, the University follows this trend. The statistics department now employs three full-time instructors. Another three are on temporary leave. According to Richards, ideally there would be at least seven full-time instructors, in addition to visiting faculty.
The Dean of the College should permit the statistics department greater leeway in its hiring practices, allowing them to aggressively seek potential tenure-track professors. Thus, more students initially considering statistics minors or mathematics majors may be attracted to these areas. Pre-Comm students may be able to get more individual and specialized attention, more so than with the currently strained battery of instructors teaching STAT 112.
Additionally, the College should ensure that basic and essential duties of the statistics department, such as filing paperwork and answering phones, is constantly done - faculty should not be forced to also take up these positions, wasting valuable class-preparation time.
If such measures aren't put into place - if the University does not focus now on the statistics department - it will continue to decline in quality of instruction. It will more and more be left behind for the greener pastures of skyscrapers along Wall Street.
(Austen Givens is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.)
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