There has been a frightening decline in the quality of maths in reports complaining about the frightening decline in the quality of maths in Britain. ‘The Value of Mathematics’, by thinktank Reform, has received large quantities of flattering media coverage this week from The Times, the Telegraph, and even scored a second puff in the Guardian from Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford’s Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. Their argument is simple: there is less maths around; people think it’s cool to be bad at sums; we suffer economically; these are bad things.
Here is a key, early, factual claim from Reform’s report: ‘About 40 per cent of mathematics graduates enter financial services.’ This, they say, is a good thing. Do we believe the number? The report references it to the front page of a website called prospects.ac.uk, which is a pretty big website. Chasing through the pages there, you will find ‘What Do Graduates Do?’, and then the maths page. There were 4,070 maths graduates in their sampling frame for the year 2006. Only 2,010 of those, however, are in UK employment (1.5 per cent are working abroad, and the rest are studying for a higher degree, or a teaching qualification, or are unemployed, or unavailable for employment, and so on).
Of those 2,010 – not 4,070 – 37.9 per cent are working as ‘Business and Financial Professionals and Associate Professionals’. So if we use maths: 2,010 × 0.379 = 761.79, and that divided by 4,070 gives us 0.1871, but let’s round up like the angry maths profs did. About 20 per cent of maths graduates enter financial services. Not 40 per cent. For a group of people complaining about the substitution of woolly modern notions like ‘relevance’ and ‘applied maths’ in place of high-end mathematical techniques, these maths profs aren’t very good at arithmetic.
They’re also not very good at basic applied maths. For example, they argue that if we simply had more people around with maths knowledge, then there would automatically be more (and more lucrative) jobs requiring that knowledge, which our new maths graduates would instantly take up. I’m not an economist, but I’m not sure labour markets work like that: there are lots of men in the north of England who are very good at mining, and nobody in a hurry to open new pits.
Unfortunately, in any case, even this aspect of the report seems to be marred by simple errors in applied arithmetic. The thinktank is worried that the loss of A-level mathematicians has resulted in lost earnings for the economy. If the number of maths candidates had remained constant, they say, there would have been an additional 430,700 over the period 1989 to 2007. In the adjacent table they say 430,031, but that’s the least of our worries. They go on to reason like this: ‘Each of these students would have earned an additional £3,080 per year due to the market premium on A-level mathematics, equating to £136,000 over their lifetime. The total gain to the economy over the period would have been over £9 billion.’
We’ll put aside the fact that the BBC said ‘A maths A-level puts on average an extra £10,000 a year on a salary [not £3,080], says Reform,’ because I can’t get £9 billion for that period with those numbers (I get £12 billion, assuming a linear decline). Even if I could, Reform are making assumptions that are hard to blindly accept: in particular, will the extra earnings for people with maths A-level really still hold, if more people have maths A-level? We could go on.
I’m happy to agree that maths is economically useful, that some people might want to avoid difficult school subjects, and that humanities graduates who think maths is uncool are bores. What I would like is someone who can be bothered to sit down and reinforce my prejudices without perpetrating crass errors of over-interpretation and getting the basic arithmetic wrong. I’ve never fully seen the point of them, but until now, I assumed that’s what thinktanks and Professors of the Public Understanding of Science are there for.