Princeton Consultants Survey Shows Gaps Between Teaching and Practice of Analytics

December 17, 2015

As reported in the current issue of Analytics eNews, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in November 2015, Princeton Consultants surveyed advanced analytics professors, students and practitioners about tools and approaches. Optimization Principal Irv Lustig reported the following findings: 

  • Students must learn more about building applications with modern technologies so they have the skills needed by the practice community
  • Professors are, for the most part, not teaching the programming languages used by students or in practice. Students and practitioners are using both Python and R, both of which are used heavily in the data science community, but faculty members are not adapting their courses to teach these new languages
  • With few exceptions, there seems to be misalignment between the use of modeling languages in academia and the use of modeling languages in practice 

To receive an executive summary of the survey findings, email us.

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