While the emphasis in tertiary education in Australia in the past has been on pre-employment training, the rapid expansion in knowledge has meant that there is an increased need to provide graduates with the opportunity to continue their education. This will often be in areas to which they have had minimal exposure in their undergraduate course. Such is the case with Arts graduates, most of whom will have had at best only a basic introduction to statistics and little opportunity to become computer literate. One way of providing this continuing education is through short courses. These are appropriate when the training needs are limited and well defined. Often a more substantial form of training is needed and this has been the motivation for the development of the Post Graduate Diploma in Social Statistics that is described in this paper.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education