It may or may not water down credentials (I tend towards the former tbh but not the point here).
My greater concern is that it’s going to hammer diversity.
When I talk about diversity here, I am not referring to skin colour or presence of Y-chromosome, I am referring to diversity of thought.
I have always viewed the greatest strength of the actuarial profession as it being open to all manner of background. You can have an ActSci degree, Math degree or even Music degree and you can enter the profession as long as you can pass the relevant exams.
But but… I can hear proponents of uni credentialing this saying: “Nothing has changed on that front!”.
In theory, true but this will drive more budding actuaries towards ActSci degrees.
Those who haven’t yet made the decision to become actuaries after high school and go into some other degree will be less likely to want to become actuaries after they graduate. From the employer’s perspective, on one hand they have an ActSci degree holder with a bunch of exemptions (also needing less study support) and another with none. From the graduate’s perspective, the non-ActSci degree holder is starting maybe 4-5 exams behind his peers.
So where we will risk ending up is that the actuarial profession consists solely of those with ActSci degree, losing the diversity of backgrounds and thought which I have always viewed as the strength of the actuarial profession.
I see this happening in the UK environment where I currently work. Not entirely sure when the exemption system started but if I look at those who are > 10 years senior to myself, virtually nobody has an actuarial science degree.
If however, I look at the newer entrants, almost everyone:
Has a UK education
Went to a UK university actuarial program
Sat for the IOA exams (or what’s left of them after hocking all the exemptions)
Studying from the same study manual (ActED has a monopoly on this)
With London Market working experience.
A level of insularity has crept into the UK Actuarial profession. Anyone not fitting the mould above is instantly deemed to be inferior.
I would hate to see FSA go the same way but hey ho… easier for the societies to make decisions without consulting those pesky members who just don’t get it.
I wonder if your co-worker was referring to the old Course 2 Macroeconomics monograph.
Take a dry subject, present it in the most boring way ever, and throw in a lot of non-trivial typos just to see if the candidates are paying attention.
The teacher from Ferris Bueller was probably more entertaining.
Ah fun memories…
There is a whole timeline here, with respect to the fall of The Equitable UK, Lord Penrose’s report, and then the Morris Review of the UK actuarial profession. That’s all in the UK, obviously, but it spurred items on the U.S. side.
One of the findings in the Morris Review had something to do with a gap in actuarial education/knowledge so that the Equitable’s actuaries valued a 6% rate guarantee at zero. … Thus, university education?
I’m not going to dig out the specific language right now, but there was a huge non sequitur between “actuaries not keeping up with academic developments” and credentialing via universities, given nobody is going to give anybody straight out of university any major responsibility for anything. It’s the senior actuaries who need to be targeted…and they’re decades away from their own graduations.
In any case, the CAS, SOA, and AAA all picked up continuing education requirements after this, and the college credit stuff is only for minor items (VEE)… except for the UK exam credits they have been doing sub rosa.
Going back to the UK examples you have, the U.S. market is unlikely to have the same problem, due to our size in population & geography. I will leave it to Canadians to let us know if everybody is coming from Waterloo, working in Toronto, etc.
The Macroeconomics study note predated the existence of Course 2, but was also used on Course 2. I agree with your general description of it by the time Course 2 came into existence, but I really wasn’t kidding on my description of the errata. It was on double digit number of pages that they had reversed every single instance of the words “supply” and “demand”. (I assume a case of the “find and replace” feature gone horribly wrong.)
Now it’s possible that the number of pages where the words were reversed has grown with the many retellings of this story, but it was considerably more than just
Mercifully I had taken macroeconomics and still had my textbook when I took Course 2. I think I got about 1.5 pages into the study note when I said “screw it… how different can my textbook be?” and reviewed my textbook instead. Passed that sucker on my first attempt doing exactly what the SOA said not to do: using outside materials instead of the source materials.
What institutions has the SOA reached out to for the diversity opportunity?
Okay, I understand why the CAE actuarial science faculty would be interested in this, but what’s in it for the SOA?
Are you concerned that students with this sort of credit will be selected against by employers? Might employers be concerned the students cannot pass FSA-level exams and thus get fully credentialed?
Probability courses are not typically under the control of the actuarial department at universities. In addition, Exam P serves as a screening device for both employers and candidates on future exam success.
But if you need to keep P out of the classroom to maintain its ability as a signaling device, doesn’t that imply the classroom is easier?
Last year the SOA had a webinar for academics on proposed changes to the education system. The only proposed changes mentioned were changing STAM and LTAM to basic actuarial modeling and advanced actuarial modeling and placing more emphasis on predictive analytics.
Interestingly the subject of university based credit was not even mentioned,
Tomorrow (Thursday, 5/27, 11am-12:15 pm CT), the Chicago Actuarial Association is having a webcast on UEC:
Description:
We will learn about the new Society of Actuaries (SoA) University Earned Credit (UEC) program, which grants SoA exam credit for college courses under limited conditions. We will find out what exams are eligible under what conditions.
Our speakers will be:
Jennifer Gillespie, SoA President-Elect
Stuart Klugman, SoA Senior Staff Fellow - Education
Gena Long, SoA Director, Professionalism & University Relations
It is ironic that you used the term insular, as proponents of the change mindlessly claim that the proposed change where most students come through a handful of universities will somehow make the profession less insular.
I agree with pretty much all of this post, but I also want to say, I’ve been seeing a lot of this being caveated lately, and I’ve done it myself, and is it really necessary? That is, doesn’t a POC, a gay person, a trans person, a woman, a _______ person, don’t they all, through their “traditional” diversity, all inherently bring diversity of thought with that? I wonder if when we caveat this to make sure the audience knows we’re talking about “diversity of thought” if what we really mean is “now, white guys, don’t get too offended by this, there’s still room for you and your pocket protector”?
I am on a diversity council with my employer and am looking at recruiting through that lens, and when we talk about diversity, yes we are mostly talking about improving the numbers of POC and women in the profession, but we also focus on things like career changers or non-traditional majors in the field, candidates with few or no exams, etc.
Still, we mostly end up hiring candidates with similar backgrounds, because that’s mostly what the pipeline is giving us. We’re working to influence the pipeline, which takes time. I agree that this kind of change is going to make it that much harder to increase diversity in the profession.
During a webinar session I attended, the committee was asked
“How will you measure the outcome of the UEC program?”
Frustratingly, their answer only mentioned increasing candidate numbers and university participation.
This is concerning because UEC is also presented as an opportunity to retain talent.
However, at no point did the committee address measuring if the initiative actually increased the value Actuarial candidates provide employers.
The committee is open about their hope that UEC reduces travel time, and now it’s clear they’re focused on increasing the number of candidates, with quality and diversity added as an afterthought.
The diversity initiative is fantastic, and I wish they’d roll it out first, rather than leaving HBCU’s playing catch-up. Everything else will diminish quality by encouraging credential-factories, which is poor stewardship of the profession.
As a recent ASA, am I eligible to vote in the upcoming election? Is there an opportunity to make this election a referendum on UEC?
People have asked what can be done, and I’ll just copy/paste from an email I sent:
So there are a variety of options (because I was involved in the prior attempt in 2009, and then dug up documents from 1970/1989-1990 when it also was around)
Here is a history:
Potential actions:
It is already past time in which people can self-nominate for the Board, so for this year we could ask candidates directly their opinion on UEC.
Petition for bylaws amendment [I forget the process, but I can dig it up] – this is essentially what was done in 1989-1990
Response letters to the SOA, especially from major actuarial employers
The third is what I consider the most impactful. That happened the last time - 2009.
For right now, I’m just amassing letters, etc., and digging through my stuff from the prior time. I lost some items with the internet death of the Actuarial Outpost (and the actual deaths of several people I had talked with back then), so I may not be able to recover some of the stuff.
Given what happened the prior couple of times, I’m looking to see if there’s member response. The reason it died the last two times was:
LOADS of members hated it
Key actuarial employers hated it.
Feel free to forward this email to anybody. I’m very happy to talk to anybody on this matter, whether they support it, don’t support it, or would just like to know more about the background on all this.
5/27?