When I was a kid, I used to think that if someone was in a high up position that they must be really smart and competent. Now that I’m in my 40s, it seems like it’s almost the opposite. Most of the people I meet or read about who are in positions of leadership, I’m wildly unimpressed by. But I could not possibly imagine the level of incompetence of the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska.

They recently cut their statistics program along with a few others based on metrics showing these program were underperforming, but there really weren’t many details of what these metrics were or how they were computed. However, AMSTAT News recently published an interview with two professors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on what happened (You can read the full article here). In that article, they detail some of the flaws in the calculation of these metrics, but one of these flaws stands out above all the others as the peak of dip shittery.

So, one of the metrics the Board of Regents used in their calculation was graduation rate. Graduation rate is the number of graduates divided by number of majors. Simple enough. Now for the statistics department, this number was 0%. Why? Because the department hadn’t yet existed for 4 years.

Here is the relevant paragraph from the AMSTAT article:

And just as a nice added middle-finger to the statistics department, the Board of Regents decided to make their own definition of what an outlier is.

There is no nice way to say this: these people are world class unimpressive.

Cheers.