Fin Review Gives Maths a Boost. (May 5, 2008)

The Australian Financial Review's Erica Cervini today leads with "Employee demand for maths graduates is far outstripping supply, positioning those with a head for numbers among the hottest property in the job market".

It is estimated that between 2005 and 2013 there will be an increase of 32.5% in demand for mathematics graduates.

On the other hand a recent OECD estimate indicates that while the OECD nations average 1% of graduates with degrees in maths or statistics, Australia comes in at 0.4%.

The president of the Australian Mathematical Society, Peter Hall, told Ms Cervini that while Australia "is very reliant on foreign companies setting up in Australia and hiring Australians ...[but, and most notably] in the pharmaceutical industry when they don't see that the skills they need are available, they won't set up shop in Australia".

And there is a rapidly increasing need for maths/stats graduates to analyse the large amounts of data produced by the new technologies.

James Franklin, professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UNSW says: "It use to be that maths graduates didn't think of finance as the first thing, but now it'd the first normal choice for them to think about."

Yet Australia produces only about 250 graduates with honours or higher degrees in mathematics annually.

Ms Cervini ends her report quoting from the 2006 review published by the Australian Academy of Science: "Australia is in danger of becoming irrelevant in the advanced mathematical sciences, and mathematics and statistics may become imported skills that are increasingly hard to obtain in a globally competitive labour market."

But do we really care?

The University of Southern Queensland seems to still be deliberating on how many mats/stats/CT academics it will shed as being superfluous to its requirements.

Meanwhile Terence Tao has now collected over 900 signatories to his petition asking USQ to reconsider.