When Douglas Simpson arrived on the University of Illinois campus in 1985 to take his first professorship straight out of grad school, the time-traveling movie Back to the Future ruled the theaters and the U of I Department of Statistics had just been founded. Today, the field of statistics is booming, and that’s something no one but a time traveler, back from the future, might have predicted in 1985, when the U of I department had only a handful of students.
Fittingly, statistics back up the stunning rise in statistics.
Even as recently as 10 to 15 years ago, the Department of Statistics had only about 30 undergrads, five to 10 master’s students, and maybe 17 to 20 PhD students, Simpson says. Since then, the number of undergrads has skyrocketed to about 200, the number of master’s students has gone up eight times to over 80, and the numbr of PhD students has nearly doubled to 35.
In 2012, Illinois conferred 52 bachelor’s degrees in statistics, making it tied for fourth with the University of Minnesota for the greatest number of bachelor’s degree graduates in statistics in the country. There are many reasons for the boom, but one of them is the rise of Big Data, says Simpson, who not only has remained on campus since the department’s inception in ’85, but is now the department head.
“A lot of large companies and corporations have large-scale data on all of their customers and supply chains,” he says. “They want to be able to use that information to make business decisions and model the growth of demand, to decide the sort of work force they need throughout the world. There’s a lot of statistical analysis that underlies those sorts of decisions.”
Scientific fields have seen the same trends toward Big Data as the business world. Biologists, geneticists, and those in medical imaging, for instance, grapple with massive data bases, as they dig deep to mine all of the information at the core of life.
With such demand for statistical management and analysis, Illinois isn’t alone in its statistics boom. Nationwide, the number of students earning bachelor’s degrees in statistical science has more than doubled in the last five years, topping 1,000 for the first time in 2012, according to the American Statistical Association.
“There’s more awareness of the field than ever,” Simpson adds. For instance, he says, high school students are more apt to have already taken a statistics course because Advanced Placement classes in statistics have emerged in the last 10 to 15 years.
In this tough economy, the healthy job market and good pay for statistics majors also make the field attractive. The American Statistical Association says employers are having a difficult time finding enough graduates to fill available positions for statisticians, and the McKinsey Global Institute predicts the U.S. will need up to 190,000 new professionals with analytical skills to help manage the Big Data movement.
“Current students, who will be graduating in December, are now deciding between multiple offers, and next year’s spring graduates are already considering offers,” Simpson says.
He says U of I graduates are finding jobs with companies as diverse as State Farm, Capital One, Nielsen, AB InBev (the parent company of Budweiser), John Deere, Walgreens, and more. One graduate even landed a job as a statistician for the Cleveland Indians baseball team.
Simpson says that although the U of I department did not form until 1985, Illinois has had a long history in probability and mathematical statistics going all of the way back to the 1930s and Joseph L. Doob, one of the world’s leading mathematicians in probability.
When a core group of mathematical statisticians and probabilists formed the new Department of Statistics in ’85, it started out with a primary emphasis on theory. Today, the theory is still there, but a wide array of courses also focus on practical data analysis tools such as: multiple regression analysis, which estimates relationships among variables; survival analysis, which analyzes the rate of system failure; statistical data management, which covers databases, sql (a programming language), and SAS (a software suite); and advanced data analysis, which covers statistical methods for analyzing databases with many variables.
In addition, students can start taking statistics courses relevant to the major in their freshman year, which they weren’t able to do when the department began. The introductory course, Statistics 100, draws over 1,400 students from all across campus each semester, while Statistics 200 trains students in key statistical techniques and in the use of R—a software language widely used by professionals for statistical computing.
Add to the mix an active internship program, and it’s no wonder the Illinois program is one of the most popular in the country. It was bound to happen. It’s all a matter of probability.
