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14Where are the majors?Iain M. JohnstoneDepartment of StatisticsStanford University, Stanford, CAWe present a puzzle in the form of a plot. No answers are given.14.1 The puzzleFigure 14.1 suggests that the field of statistics in the US is spectacularly anduniquely unsuccessful in producing Bachelor’s degree graduates when comparedwith every other undergraduate major for which cognate AdvancedPlacement (AP) courses exist. In those same subject areas, statistics also producesby far the fewest Bachelor’s degrees when the normalization is takenas the number of doctoral degrees in that field. We are in an era in whichdemand for statistical/data scientists and analytics professionals is exploding.The puzzle is to decide whether this plot is spur to action or merely anirrelevant curiosity.14.2 The dataThe “Subjects” are, with some grouping, those offered in AP courses by theCollege Board in 2006. The number of students taking these courses varieswidely, from over 500,000 in English to under 2,000 in Italian. In the 2006data, the statistics number was about 88,000 (and reached 154,000 in 2012).The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) publishes data onthe number of Bachelor’s, Master’s and doctoral degrees conferred by degreegranting institutions.Bachelor-to-AP ratio is, for each of the subjects, the ratio of the numberof Bachelor’s degrees in 2009–10 to the number of AP takers in 2006. One153