Ellen Kirkman, College Board of the Mathematical Sciences

Since 1965, the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) has undertaken a comprehensive study of U.S. undergraduate programs in the mathematical sciences, with funding from the National Science Foundation and support from the mathematical sciences professional societies.

A stratified random sample of 600 institutions was selected for the 2010 survey from the roughly 2,500 institutions that are either public two-year colleges or (public or private) four-year colleges and universities that have undergraduate programs in mathematics or statistics. This year, for the first time, the survey instrument will be available both online and in print.

The CBMS surveys request enrollment data for individual courses and information about majors, curriculum, and pedagogy at the surveyed institutions; additional information about faculty is collected from the Annual Survey of the Mathematical Sciences. A report based on the gathered data will be published in the spring of 2012, both online and in a paper monograph. Reports of the 2005, 2000, 1995, and 1990 CBMS surveys can be found here.

The CBMS surveys have been useful to academic planners and department chairs. Findings from the 2005 survey include the following:

• In four-year college and university statistics departments, elementary-level enrollments in fall 2005 were essentially unchanged from fall 2000 levels and were 10% above 1995 levels. Upper-level statistics enrollments grew by about 20% between 2000 and 2005, after increasing by about 25% between 1995 and 2000.
• In two-year colleges, statistics enrollments, which had increased by less than 3% between 1995 and 2000, increased by almost 60% between fall 2000 and fall 2005.
• In doctoral statistics departments, the number of full-time faculty members reversed a decline that had occurred between 1995 and 2000, and, in fall 2005, was about 13% larger than in fall 1995.

Given the data’s importance to the statistical community, administrators of those departments selected for the survey are urged to complete the survey. The new online system has a number of advantages over the hardcopy form: It will automatically skip those questions that are not applicable (based on earlier responses), gray out portions of questions that do not apply, remind one of previous responses, and provide definitions when the cursor hovers over certain highlighted words.

Questions about the survey may be addressed to the survey director, Ellen Kirkman, at kirkman@wfu.edu or the statistical science representative, Dalene Stangl, at dalene@stat.duke.edu.