Nonmathematical statistics: A new direction for the undergraduate discipline

Abstract

The explosion in the amount of data available to society today has not led to a corresponding growth in undergraduate statistics programs to produce statisticians to deal with such data. Instead, the profession is faced with the specter of “statistics departments under siege.” It is time to reexamine the undergraduate discipline in light of society's needs. The traditional emphasis on the mathematics of the discipline may have resulted in insufficient attention being paid to its nonmathematical aspects. These things are very much a part of what a practicing statistician does and what customers of statistics need. They include things like designing scientific studies in a team-oriented environment, ensuring protocol compliance, ensuring data quality, managing the storage/transmission/retrieval of data, and providing descriptive and graphical analyses of data. To bring greater purpose and practicality to programs for the undergraduate statistics major, it will be necessary to give greater prominence to nonmathematical statistics. Courses are suggested that would meet important needs of the undergraduate statistics major and set the discipline of statistics apart from mathematics. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.