Advice From Prospective Employers on Training BS Statisticians

The time envisioned by H. G. Wells has arrived. Statistical thinking is a necessity for educated citizens. Educational institutions, especially liberal arts institutions, have been rethinking their curriculums and the need for teaching statistical and quantitative thinking skills. The American Statistical Association has initiated work to prepare a set of recommendations for undergraduate education in statistics, both for undergraduate statistics majors and for the statistics component of other degree programs. A three-stage effort began in May of 1999, with a small group of statisticians who met at ASA headquarters in Alexandria, VA. They planned to develop a set of short discussion papers on the important issues in statistics education; these papers would then form the basis of a larger symposium to be held in conjunction with the Joint Statistical Meetings in August 2000. This article, which summarizes advice from prospective employers of BS statisticians, arose from one of the workshop papers. The purpose of this article is threefold: