My son is a rising senior in high school and is good at math and giving some thought to a math minor with a double major in accounting and finance. I’m trying to help him find a couple of classes to take this fall (no easy task, since many are full), and am trying to figure out the difference between statistics and business statistics. Do students take both?
From all that I’ve read, and that my D’16 has been exposed to in reading her college course catalog, I would say that you and your son will find that if he stays on his current proposed course of study, he will find himself with his feet in two very different worlds.
A student strong enough in math to take a minor in it may find that there is a huge imbalance in his own skills at calculating and thinking through the work than those in finance (not accounting). Perhaps it depends on the program and the college/university, and it could be that I have only spoken about such issues with hardcore math and science majors.
When looking through college course catalogs I have noticed that once the word ‘business’ is added before a field of study, the class descriptions seemed less rigorous than those without the qualifying ‘business.’
@Waiting2exhale I understand what your are saying about the lack of rigor. My son has tremendous aptitude in math and enjoys it, and for the longest time said he wanted to go into STEM. Over time he saw how much work it was and slowly changed to business. I will say that he is taking a course in surveying this summer that includes autocad, and he really hates working with it, so perhaps he’s made a good choice.
My experience is that a business curriculum is different from math, but not necessarily less rigorous, particularly if one is in a strong program. I can say that the high levels of math are more theoretical than the upper level business classes.
Without seeing the course descriptions I would imagine that stat and business stat cover much of the same material but that the business stat tries to incorporate how the concepts taught can be applied in the business world. People generally would not take both stat and business stat as there would likely be a tremendous degree of overlap.
I took business stat and work full time on a team primarily made up of stat and econometrics majors. It’s essentially the same difference as business econ vs theoretical econ. Business courses in general are about applicability and less about theoretical outcomes or problems and for that reason are less technical.
Business stats is focused on probabilities, distributions, regressions, etc. utilized to produce information to drive business decisions which don’t necessarily require a strong foundation in mathematics. Regular intro stat courses will focus on the same topics but with prerequisites focused on each of the basic elements of statistics such as probability and distribution. Advanced stat courses will often require calc I, II, III whereas higher level business stat courses likely won’t require much more than calc I.