Introduction

In this article I would like to gather all the scattered information that exists about the Statistics departments in our country. I will mostly analyse information that can be found online, as if I had to fill in my university-preferences form. In any case, however, I discourage you from choosing a school based solely on this article. In this category I simply include the schools that are related to Statistics. The departments I will compare are the following:

Entry score

A first criterion for many people is the entry score, which is the minimum grade you must have achieved in the National Exams to be admitted to the corresponding school, or, put differently, the grade of the last admitted candidate, given the number of places. In my opinion, though, this indicator shows how desirable a school is rather than its level of studies. Below, I gathered historical entry-score data (from 2013 to 2022) from the four Statistics departments and made a simple chart. It shows that historically the department with the highest entry score is AUEB (with the sole exception of 2015). Second in preference comes the Statistics department of Piraeus. Last in preference are the regional Statistics departments, Aegean and Western Macedonia, based in Samos and Grevena respectively. Presumably the fact that they are located outside the main urban centres does not make them attractive to the majority of candidates.

Places

Every year the Ministry of Education announces the available places for each school and each category of examinees. In this analysis I focus on the candidates from General High Schools, who make up the overwhelming majority of participants. At first glance I notice a reversal of the results compared with the entry score. That is, the schools with the relatively higher entry score offer fewer places, while more places are offered by the schools with a lower entry score. To back this up, I observe AUEB’s Statistics department hovering around 100 available places, followed by that of the University of Piraeus, which significantly reduced its places in recent years and has fallen to the offering levels of the Aegean Statistics department. A special case is the newly established Grevena department of the University of Western Macedonia, which had quite a large number of available places, and this large supply is possibly due to the absence of admitted candidates for that particular regional department.

Of course, offering places does not always mean filling them. Many of them may remain unfilled due to low demand. This phenomenon is observed in schools outside urban centres. In recent years there is an additional reason, since the minimum entry threshold (EBE) was instituted, which prevents a school’s entry score from falling below a certain grade (e.g. below 7 or 13), and that is why the first entry-score chart shows a sharp rise for the Aegean and Western Macedonia schools. Since the introduction of the EBE, we now observe unfilled places in low-preference regional departments. Thus, the number of admitted students can now differ significantly not only between departments inside and outside large urban centres (e.g. University of the Aegean, University of Western Macedonia – Grevena), but also with respect to the available number of entrants versus the enrolled students.

Requirements for a degree

All four departments offer 4-year studies and someone is designated a graduate upon acquiring 240 ECTS. Their differences come down mainly to the number of courses or to whether a dissertation is required. Note that the above information is based on the recent study guides of the departments in question (2022-2023).

Elective courses

Above we saw how many courses a student of each department has to be examined in to obtain a degree. How much freedom is there in each department for the students themselves to adapt their studies to their preferences and personal research interests? This is what I tried to study by adding the variable of elective courses and the share they make up of the total courses.

Late graduation

The Piraeus department has the highest share of late graduation, with 7 out of 10 of its students being in their 7th year or above. The Athens and Samos departments follow with a large percentage-point gap. The Grevena department is newly established and has no n+2 students. In all Statistics departments there is a common pattern of a fairly high share of students being in their 7th year or above, where they constitute the majority of undergraduates.

Other information

Key curriculum characteristics by department.
UniversityCourse registration limitCourse prerequisitesDissertationGrade calculation
AUEB Yes Yes Optional Arithmetic mean
UniPi 2011 No No No Weighted mean
UniPi 2017 No No No Arithmetic mean
Aegean No No Optional Weighted mean
UoWM No No No Arithmetic mean

Map

Finally, it would be interesting to practise my map-making skills in R. I usually use Shapefiles to get a base (in this case the borders of Greece); however, this time I decided to use the rnaturalearth package. It is worth noting that the rnaturalearthdata and rnaturalhires packages are also required.

The four departments, together with their location and their key details, are summarised in the table below:

The four public undergraduate Statistics departments, all 4-year programmes.
UniversityDepartmentTownDepartment foundedStudents
University of Piraeus Statistics and Insurance Science Piraeus 1977 3207
University of the Aegean Statistics and Actuarial–Financial Mathematics Samos 2000 1035
Athens University of Economics and Business Statistics Athens 1989 1203
University of Western Macedonia Statistics and Insurance Science Grevena 2019 555

Epilogue

My personal view is that the Aegean Statistics department is a very tempting option. It presents itself (I stress this, presents itself) as a serious department with a modern study guide (few courses, offset by a corresponding workload). In my opinion this particular department is done an injustice by the entry score it has. If I had the option to choose without taking the financial criterion into account (rent costs etc.), it would be my first choice. Of course, this choice, as I wrote at the start, is based exclusively on information I would find online and simply gathered into an article. There are also other things that play a very important role, such as the teaching staff, the level of the courses, adherence to regulations, facilities, accessibility and more, which unfortunately you will only find out about when it is too late.

Photo by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay