This is a post regarding Numbers to Live By , Inside Higher Education, February 23, 2006. (I fixed a typo or two.)

Being a Math Professor I guess I should reply to Jim. Many departments use math courses as a filter. Our physiology major requires two semesters of calculus for engineering majors. I asked one of their faculty members what they used the second semester stuff for. He said they had too many students! We did not ask them to do this. I have heard of vet school that required vector calculus! This is hard stuff. If a part of your job is weeding out students, it is hard to be Prof. Nice Guy all the time.

We cannot find the people we need in the U.S. Close to half the new Ph.D.'s awarded in the U.S. are to foreigners. Many speak English fine, but do have accents. Student's who are not getting the material will sometimes latch on to this as an excuse. (Studies on this have been reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, at least for TA's.) Sometimes students complain that they have to study the book to understand it. But, that's how college teaching goes; much more of the burden is on the learner! But, it is true that some instructors (foreign and native) are put in the classroom too soon. But, what should we do? Hire Americans who do not understand math to teach it? That hasn't worked out so well in the high schools.

What math should all college students know? First we tired forcing everyone through "College Algebra," which is a rehash of high school math. If you did well in high school math and have been away from the classroom for awhile, this might be OK as a refresher course. But for students who are really learning algebra for the first time, it is a nightmare. Two years of math in one semester! These students should go to a CC if they want to major in a field that requires much math.

But, many majors do not use much math. Eventually, we wised up and created watered down core curriculum survey courses taught to hundreds of people at a time, just like our colleagues in the humanities do. Eventually, administrators figured they the high pass rates did not imply a great deal was being learned. Students in majors that did use a little math weren't getting what they needed.

Now there is a push to do what Jim suggests: Require a baby stats course. I'd throw in some game theory at the end. How well this will work I do not know. If you have smaller classes, what kind of people are we going to be able to hire to cover these courses?

As a last note, math is used in surprising places. I knew some people working in a psychology lab. Their paper was rejected because they did not take into account the rate of diffusion of a stain they used on slides of rat brains thin sections. The referee referred them to a formula in another paper. They could not even read it. They did not even use the correct units for the time variable. The formula was an infinite sum of exponential and cosine functions. That's right, it was a Calculus II problem! I worked it out for them. For the intensely curious, here is a link to the equation: Big Equation.