Posted April 7 2008
Statistically Speaking…
Today I met a fascinating man. Well, that’s deceptive. He’s rather nondescript. His job sounds, and probably is, rather boring. He works with numbers, though not financially. He analyzes data, though nothing classified or secret.
He is Yeshiva University’s in-house statistician.
His job is to analyze data in using advanced statistical tools (I’ve been in a class about advanced statistics, so I know a little more about this than I used to). Simply put, if a professor thinks students are coming from wealthier homes, he can use data from all areas of the university - admissions, finances, alumni, registrar, etc. - to find out whether this assumption is true.
The value of this is tremendous as far as YU is concerned - the more an institution knows about itself, the better it can form policy to best benefit its students and the community it serves. For example, he mentioned that he had been asked to investigate grade inflation (a frequent accusation in Jewish schools). He found that while the numbers did support the claim of higher average grades, the average SAT scores had risen as well, as had rejection rates. The conclusion? Yes, grades are higher, but the students, statistically speaking, are smarter.
This has far more powerful implications than just for Yeshiva University policy. While many people went crazy following the publication of the infamous NJPS study several years ago (where we discovered that 52% of Jews were intermarried), there were some serious problems with the statistics. Poor statistics lead to poorly analyzed results, and deceptive information. This can lead to poor policy choices - all because some researcher was eager for scary-looking numbers.
Until recently, few Jewish organizations were studied seriously on their own terms, either because they were nervous about letting outsiders see their true numbers, or because of a dearth of serious researchers interested in their data (and not in a larger context). Jewish organizations, and especially Orthodox schools, operate so strangely that it is difficult to join them with others for analysis. Now, however, there are more and more studies being done at the highest level of scholarship on specifically Jewish schools and organizations. This gives us hope that we may soon have a real picture of where we are as a people, and not have to rely on rumor and impression.
I was never a huge fan of statistics. It all seemed rather silly - I mean, how can those numbers possibly be valid? But as I learn more and more, I respect their place more and more. There are enormous safeguards within the mathematics of it to ensure that the results are both reasonable and valid, checked a dozen different ways against multiple factors. Multicollinearity, homeoscedasticity, homogeneity, descriptives…the list of tests done to ensure valid data is long and arduous. But we can no longer think and, more importantly, act as a nation unless we have understand ourselves. And we are now too big to rely on the shtetl psychology - “What do people say about this?” “What’s the oilam think?” It’s time to treat ourselves seriously. We may discover that our national problems are far less severe than we think. We may even discover that we can fix our seemingly insurmountable problems.
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