For some high school students, statistics and other data science courses have unseated calculus as the de facto option for pursuing advanced math, in part due to targeted state efforts to expand pathways to higher-level coursework.
But critics of this trend have asked whether students who opt for statistics will miss out on important math skills for college and career if they don’t take calculus. The debate over the most important math pathways in high school—and how that shapes course sequences—has raged for years, implicating everything from when algebra is first offered to U.S. students’ falling scores on the probability and statistics portion of national exams.
New research suggests the answer isn’t so clear cut. In fact, it depends on what kind of major, and what kind of career, students want to pursue, finds a new study of about more than 5 million Texas students from researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the University of Texas at Austin.
Of the 178,000 students who took either Advanced Placement Calculus AB course or AP Statistics from 2015-2020, the calculus-takers were more likely to enroll in selective colleges and pursue majors in science, technology, engineering, and math than an otherwise similar group of their peers who took AP Statistics.
But life outcomes for students were similar, regardless of which course they took. Analyzing students who graduated from 2003-2020, the researchers found students who took AP Statistics and AP Calculus were equally likely to earn a bachelor’s degree and had similar long-term earnings. And AP Statistics students were well-represented in scientific and math-intensive industries.
The results demonstrate that if schools provide an equally rigorous alternative to AP Calculus, “you’re probably not going to see a big difference in the outcomes of students who opt for that alternative,” said Adam Tyner, an author on the report, and the national research director at the Fordham Institute.
The findings reinforce a message that many in the secondary math field have been trying to spread for years now—calculus isn’t inherently more applicable to students’ careers, or their lives post-graduation, than statistics, said Josh Recio, the systemic transformation lead at the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Recio was not involved with the report.
Still, in practice, Recio said, “there absolutely is a difference” between the two courses.
“If I’m counseling a student based on what their four-year aspirations are, and if they have aspirations to go to a four-year school, maybe a prestigious school, I am absolutely counseling them to take calculus,” he said.
The college admissions Catch-22
College admissions officers, especially at selective institutions, have a persistent preference for calculus as a differentiator, believing that it signals which students are ready for college-level work, research from the math-equity focused nonprofit Just Equations has shown.
“People don’t realize how much of an unwritten rule it is that calculus is taken into account,” said Andrea McChristian, the organization’s national policy director.
The course also makes students more attractive to organizations that match low-income and first-generation students with selective colleges, said Adrian Mims, the founder and CEO of the Calculus Project, a national nonprofit based in Massachusetts that aims to increase the number of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students in advanced math courses that lead to calculus.
“These are programs that help kids get into low-loan or no-loan colleges with large endowments—and these programs are very competitive,” he said.
Opportunities for students taking statistics won’t be truly equal to those of their peers in calculus until colleges see the courses that way, Recio said.
“This one report is not going to change the way admissions is viewed nationwide, but it’s a start,” he said.
Is ‘rigor’ the key to successful alternative pathways?
The researchers applied statistical controls to create two groups—one who took AP Statistics, and one who took AP Calculus AB—that were functionally equivalent with regard to student characteristics, prior performance, and other factors.
Both groups were equally likely to attend a four-year institution and complete a bachelor’s degree. But students who took calculus were six percentage points more likely to enroll in the most selective colleges. Calculus takers were also 11 percentage points more likely to pick a STEM major, and 10 percentage points more likely to graduate with a STEM degree. Engineering, computer science, and biological science degrees drove most of this difference.
Post-college, students who took different math courses in high school cluster into different industries. Calculus students are more likely to work in manufacturing, health care, oil and gas, and construction, while statistics students are more likely to work in finance, hospitality and food service, administrative services, real estate, and the arts.
Still, long-term earnings are roughly the same. At 10 years post college, calculus students make slightly more annually than statistics students, and then the advantage switches by 17.5 years post college, but neither difference is statistically significant.
“[S]tudents, families, and admissions counselors need to know that AP Statistics is not inferior to AP Calculus, at least when it comes to long-term earnings and choice of industry or career field,” the report’s authors write.
In part, these equivalent outcomes could be a result of the “rigorous standards and common assessments” in AP courses, they say.
“With AP, we’ve got the AP curriculum, the AP assessment; we can be pretty confident in the rigor of the course,” said Tyner.
That’s not always the case with alternatives to calculus, the report’s authors write—citing the example of California, where a University of California committee in 2023 reversed a decision to allow data science as a substitute for an Algebra 2 course requirement, after fielding concerns that the data science courses wouldn’t give students adequate preparation for college-level math.
In the Texas report, the AP designation seemed to be one differentiator for student outcomes. Texas students who took AP courses in statistics or calculus were more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree and earn higher salaries than their peers who did not. (The researchers did not employ statistical controls for these comparisons, though, so it’s likely other factors contributed to these outcomes beyond course-taking.)
Still, the vast range of rigor in courses that carry the same name is a problem that plagues high school math—not just statistics or data science, said Mims.
In Massachusetts, where the Calculus Project originated, there are 33 different names for 8th grade math courses, most of which purport to prepare students for Algebra 1, with varying success, he said. A course that might be called Introduction to Precalculus in one district might be taught with the same content under the name Algebra 2 and Trigonometry in another, he added.
In general, schools need to provide clearer, more flexible pathways for students to get to higher-level classes, said Recio.
“There have to be multiple entry points into this,” he said.
