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.
Yes, major actuarial employers have the most clout. They are one of the most important “customers” of the societies. They pay most of the exam fees and most of the costs of meetings and most of the dues.
I agree with this sentiment. Some of our greatest contributors in advancing knowledge in this profession come from members of diverse academic backgrounds. This process will likely result in a more insular profession.
If these actuarial schools are indeed of such high quality, it should be no problem for their graduates to pass exams. I know Waterloo and Laval prepare their students well. Their graduates generally have no problems passing exams now, so this seems to be a solution in search of a problem. IANACA
The University-Earned Credit (UEC) program is the first component of this transformative approach to roll out over the next few months.
I will note the “first” and “transformative”. So… if they have to step back from this first component, will we not get the other transformative components? Hmmm.
And to anyone else who thinks I’m being overdramatic, just look at the demographics of NYC specialized high schools compared to schools like Bard.
The less meritocratic and more subjective standards are, the more wealthy people (Specifically wealthy whites) benefit. These whites at the top don’t want a fair playing field. They want to eliminate all metrics that would show that they’re mediocre.
Also one of the useful things I took away from my Marketing class was the market share calculation:
At its most basic you have
Share(A) = Sales(A) / Sales(Market)
But an alternative way to arrive at this same number is:
Share(A) = Awareness(A) x Consideration(A) x Close Rate(A)
So if you want to increase your sales/share you have to increase one or more of Awareness, Consideration, or Close Rate.
If people aren’t aware of the actuarial field they won’t ultimately choose it.
If people are aware but won’t consider it, they won’t ultimately choose it.
Some people are aware of and consider the actuarial field and still choose something else.
If proposed raising awareness as something that could potentially increase diversity. I think that’s one where we could do a lot more than we’re currently doing. It’s the low-hanging fruit of that formula, IMO.
I should add that awareness has two components: awareness of the market (actuaries exist and you could be one) vs awareness of your particular brand (SOA/CAS/JBEA/AAA etc).
But I think we’ve long held that we don’t really want the societies competing against each other, so I think awareness of the market is what we should be focused on.
I see St Johns is on the list. It must be the previously known as “college of insurance” that merged with St Johns years ago. Back in my day, I’d take review classes at the college of insurance, and heard that the regular students there weren’t particularly good with actuarial exams. now they just get actuarial exams handed to them. yay!
And they have some amazing historical documents there, including books of names in Irish annuities. (It wasn’t only France that did this dumbass thing, but what was “lucky” for the Irish annuities is that a lot of people killed in the French Revolution have their names on the lists…)
5/27?
