Many epochal developments over the last few years have been underpinned by statistics. Arguments about global warming, trade wars, Big Data movement, development and use of AI are all based on the discipline of statistics. Success stories of statistics being applied in public and private sectors abound and the current interest in analytics is reaching an all-time peak.

This may make you believe that it wasn’t until recently that statistic became serious foundational tool for various aspects of governance and policy making but that is not true. Statisticians have been deeply involved with the development of private corporations for over half a century, being used in the mainstream or at least in some parts by some major corporations worldwide. Almost all research, particularly related to consumers, medical and Engineering requires rigorous application of statistics to establish validity of the findings or hypothesis.

In the Engineering industry, Statistical Quality Control, the branch of statistics devoted to the study and analysis of production and manufacturing processes, was developed over 80 years ago and it has been widely used since the past century. Many aspects of TQM/ISO:9001 or any other framework of Quality Management demand use of statistical tools.

Given this importance of statistics in our profession and even in daily life, isn’t it high time educational institutions invest more time and energy in churning out ‘statistically smart’ graduates?