My Quest to Find the World’s Best Math Class

Have you ever wondered which class would land you the highest paying job in the shortest amount of time?

I recently set out to find the “best” class taught in America. I didn’t really know what I was looking for as I don’t think money or academic rigor definitively make you the best, but they surely factor into it. After doing some thinking I determined that I would focus on career outcomes at first as that seemed to be the most widely tracked data and would be a good starting point in determining one class’s value versus another.

Why did I do this? Well, because when I was recently reflecting back to my college experience I wondered what I would have done differently had I known then what I know now. Which got me thinking, it never really is too late to go back and learn so why not go through the thought experiment of evaluating what’s currently out there. For my search I decided to focus on math as it was applicable to many fields and seemingly always in demand. To start this search I had to figure out which class I would take. Upon doing some research and personal reflection I determined statistics would be my area of focus. To be specific I wanted to find the best actuarial statistics class in the US. This gave me a class that was offered at a wide variety of schools while still being specific enough to reasonably determine which offering would be the best.

I started my search as anyone might, by taking to Google. After searching for a few iterations of “best actuarial statistic class” I learned that there were quite a few ways to rank school programs. The first was the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard which lets you filter schools by field of study, cost, and graduation rates; with even some data on average earnings. After selecting a few schools in the statistics and mathematics list to compare I tried to determine which was best but most failed to report earnings data, and even so this was an entire degree program not just one class.

Getting more granular in my research I turned to the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS program. By doing some digging on what I will generously call a very hard to use website I was able to find a few areas where I might pull data on various program costs and compare some select outcome data. The problem being that again the data seemed to sit at the program level. Furthermore, institutions had to opt-in and self-report to IPEDS meaning that the data may be incomplete or inaccurate. I decided to search a bit further.

Turning to the private market, I decided that U.S. News Rankings might be the best place to look. As long as I can remember they have been a widely trusted source for ranking schools and offered a wide range of categories to search from. While I was unwilling to pay for their college compass database, I was impressed by their inclusion of online and international course options in their rankings, although this was considered a separate data set from traditional four year programs. I was able to filter down to the “best value” for statistics majors and found Yale and other traditional premiere universities atop the list. While most of the data was locked I was able to discern that based on post-collegiate salaries and cost of admission this determination was likely being made. But how helpful was that really? Were the high salaries due to the Yale brand or actually because they taught you better or higher level statistics than others? Also why were the independent certificates not included on this list as they were potentially the same content being taught at the traditional universities? Was it the intangibles of the Yale degree such as elective courses and classmates that made their statistics program so much better than the rest?

I decided to reverse engineer the problem and search out the people making the most from their actuarial statistic knowledge and then search back to where they went to school. Based on data from Indeed I determined that Actuarial Managers were the highest paid professions in the field and took to Linkedin to see where people with that Job Title had gone to school. While education varied widely, one thing was the same: they were all members of the same Society of Actuaries (SOA). Upon visiting the SOA website I was extremely impressed with their educational pathways diagrams as they clearly listed out all exams and classes one needed to become a ranking actuary, and even offered microprograms for those interested in data science among other specialties. But alas, once again I came up short as even though there was an outline for success there was no actual ranking from the SOA one which programs would best prepare you for their various exams and life as an actuary.

At this point I knew that the data I was looking for was likely not available. There is no unbiased and fully encompassing public database to determine exactly which classes or even small groups of classes really are the best bang for your buck. Furthermore, academia is largely self-reported and students really aren’t incentivized to share which classes best prepared them for their career. Additionally it really is a difficult challenge to determine who was the “best teacher” or “best content” as these questions are largely subjective in nature. With all that said, I still was pretty discouraged by my search.

If as a nation we cannot not define the best classes how could employers hope to find the most qualified candidates? Additionally, how could students make an informed decision on the value of the education they are pursuing if data was clumped into wide buckets and not contextualized for the learning environment of 2022. As I mentioned earlier all three databases could report on the cost of school, and even average salaries by degree, but were these salaries due to the merit of programs or because of a repeating loop where the top schools have always placed students into the top firms? Additionally as more certificates and alternative schooling options enter the market and build relationships with organizations such as the Society of Actuaries and large employers who are willing to hire outside the normal “best schools” should these programs not be ranked side by side with the top schools in the country? Once the prestige fades away all we are left with is merit, and that is what I could not find in these rankings.

In 2018 2.5% of GDP was spent on higher education. This will only continue to grow as a mass reskilling of employees into the technical workforce continues to fill over 25 million technical jobs by 2025. Job reskilling is costly and intimately understanding the needs of the workforce and employers will be critical to making optimal investments into our communities. Not everyone can afford a four year degree, and frankly looking at the Society of Actuaries tracks I am not sure it is even needed to land some of the most prestigious jobs in the market. At EDUcoin we aim to change this paradigm and create an open database where skills learned in classes can be traced to employment outcomes. By doing so we hope to offer the first ever rankings that refine data to the class level and move past the traditional degree model when evaluating education. If you are interested in learning more about how we do this visit educoinapp.com for a free trial.