ACTUARIAL SCIENCE UPDATE

by Richard L. (Dick) London, FSA

Director of Actuarial Science

This is the sixth in a series of annual articles describing the status of the Department's Program in Actuarial Science.

A. The Past Academic Year

We have just completed the academic year 2003-04 at the time of this writing. The program continues to be healthy in terms of total student enrollments (both undergraduate and graduate), the undergraduate scholarship program ($76,500 awarded to 28 students this year), summer internship opportunities, and full-time positions for those of our graduating students who have passed at least one of the SOA/CAS professional qualification exams.

Our core faculty group remained at five this year, although Chuck Vinsonhaler was on sabbatical leave during the Spring 2004 semester. In his absence we were fortunate to have recent grad Paul Navratil (BS 2000, MS 2001) help us out in an adjunct capacity.

B. Future Faculty Changes

I anticipate that the upcoming 2004-05 academic year will be my last one as Director of Actuarial Science at UConn. Accordingly, we undertook a search over the past year to find a replacement for both my teaching and administrative responsibilities. The result of this search was the hiring of Louis J. Lombardi, FSA, MA, who will be joining our full-time actuarial faculty group for the 2004-05 academic year. Professor Lombardi is a graduate of Central Connecticut State and did graduate work in mathematics at Tufts University. He has been employed in both life insurance companies and actuarial consulting firms for the past 26 years.

In addition to Professor Lombardi, the actuarial faculty group will receive the half-time services of a new post-doctoral fellow next year: Dmitry Glotov will receive his Ph.D. from Purdue University this summer and join our group in the fall. The addition of Professors Lombardi and Glotov means that we will actually have a surplus of teaching resources for the 2004-05 academic year, as I will be overlapping for one year with the new additions. In particular, we will use this expansion of resources to establish separate sections of several of our core courses that have heretofore combined both undergraduate and graduate students in the same section. These combined classes have been reaching total enrollments of up to 50 students, which is inappropriately large for such advanced topics.

Over the next several years, however, as the "three old men" of Bridgeman, London, and Vinsonhaler (if not actually Bird, McHale, and Parrish) move on, a complete restructuring of the actuarial faculty group will need to occur. Preliminary planning for that eventuality is currently under way.

C. Curriculum Changes

Effective in 2005, the SOA and CAS are instituting some small, but significant, changes in their recommended curricula. For the first time ever, new entrants into the actuarial profession will be required to show that they have had appropriate academic coursework in certain topics. Universities will need to submit certain basic information about their course offerings in these topics in order to be on the list of schools offering approved courses. The first three topics to be included on the list of required courses are (1) micro- and macro-economics, (2) quantitative corporate finance, and (3) time series and forecasting. We do not anticipate any difficulty in getting the relevant UConn courses placed on the approved list.

These changes in the professional qualification requirements will not affect our curriculum design, since our students have tended to take such courses in any case. It may alter the order in which students take certain courses, but not the overall set of courses taken.

D. Accreditation of Actuarial Programs

The Society of Actuaries' Board of Governors is currently debating a proposal that SOA undertake a project of accreditation of academic Actuarial Science programs. The fundamental purpose of professional program accreditation is to serve as additional motivation for schools to build excellence into their programs. Accrediting of schools by a professional society is also a service to the public, which views it as a strong statement that institutions on the accredited list are schools of high quality for the study of the discipline. Depending on what standards of accreditation are ultimately selected, we might need to do some amount of faculty and/or curriculum upgrading at UConn in order to be among the chosen few.

It is too early to speculate on what the ultimate benefits of accredited status may entail, if, indeed, this program of accreditation is undertaken at all. The Society Board is expected to decide on the accreditation question later this year at its annual meeting in October. Stay tuned for further details.

[Editor's note: Richard L. London is a vice-president of the Society of Actuaries, with special responsibilities in actuarial education.]

Math Day: Dick London preparing to recognize outstanding achievement by our actuarial science students