As the president of the American Statistical Association (ASA), Sastry Pantula has considerable influence over the promotion of statistics in American life and business. There is plenty for him to cheer about these days; the use of statistics is growing continuously in the world of science, technology and business, and the future seems bright for his ilk. Being of Indian origin — he was the first non-Caucasian president of ASA — he is sometimes puzzled and worried by a small trend: he sees fewer and fewer Indian students of statistics in American universities. Pantula is doubly involved in statistics; he is professor of statistics at the North Carolina State University.

Pantula believes that the information technology (IT) boom in India is one reason for this dip. “Things started to fall off after Y2K,” he says, alluding to the time when the Indian IT industry began its rise. Indian statistics graduates get jobs easily in IT companies, but most of them do not entail statistics. “If a student spends three years to do a PhD, his or her ability to earn goes up significantly,” he says. And just as Pantula sees a drop in the number of Indian statistics students in the US, he also sees a rise in the number of Chinese students.

Statistics students should heed Pantula. Statistics doctorates can earn as much as $1,25,000 in their first jobs if it is in a good company. PhD holders in engineering, in comparison, could start with $90,000 if they are lucky, and that too only in certain fields like computer science. Doctors and lawyers earn much more, but a doctorate in statistics could start with a salary roughly equal to that of an MBA from a top US B-school. “It is a pretty good compensation to start with,” says Leland Wilkinson, adjunct professor of statistics at Northwestern University, and chief technology officer of Systat Software Inc.

Statisticians are currently going through possibly one of the best periods in their professional lives, and the future looks even better. For as long as anyone can remember, statistics was a poor relation of mathematics.

Many universities still have statistics as part of the mathematics department. “Statistics departments used to be dwarfed by the business schools and engineering departments,” says Wilkinson. “The subject used to be treated like an offshoot of maths.”

Not anymore. Many universities in the US are expanding their statistics departments. For example, Texas A&M University is doubling the size of its statistics department over the next decade. Many universities now have separate mathematics and statistics departments, with the latter offering a variety of specialisations.

The Miami University of Ohio was one of the most recent ones to separate the mathematics and statistics departments and provide the latter with an identity of its own. The American Statistical Association, along with private companies, universities and the government, is working to bring about major curriculum changes in statistics.

As digital data explode, a large number of companies in many fields are planning to hire statisticians for a variety of jobs. In one of its largest hiring sprees, for example, IBM intends to increase the size of its business analytics team from 200 to 4,000. Other large future employers of statisticians include the pharmaceutical industry, the IT industry and the banking and finance industry (despite its current problems). In the academic world, climate change research, weather prediction and biology are major areas where statisticians are employed.

Much of the resurgence of statistics has to do with the increasing power of computer science. The merging of computer science and statistics, the so-called computational statistics, is a rapidly developing field that promises to grow for at least another decade. Within this field, visualisation would provide some of the most exciting developments in the next decade. Some of the current computer graphics might seem spectacular, but they are nothing compared to what could be done in the coming decade.

Vvital stats

Institutes in Calcutta

Indian Statistical Institute
www.isical.ac.in

BSc

St Xavier’s College
www.sxccal.edu

Scottish Church College
www.scottishchurch.ac.in

Presidency College
www.presidencycollegekolkata.ac.in

This is not an exhaustive list