The number of undergraduate students who earn statistics degrees grew by 95 percent nationally from 2010 to 2013, making it the fastest-growing STEM degree in the country, according to a American Statistical Association report released Tuesday.

“There’s a need for people who can interpret and understand data and who have the statistical tools for turning that data into information,” ASA President David Morganstein said.

Enrollment in this university’s statistics track of the mathematics major jumped 57 percent since 2011, and the number of students taking 400-level statistics courses rose from 1,018 in 2012 to 1,596 in 2014, according to Scott Wolpert, mathematics professor and the department chairman.

In response to the growing demand, the mathematics department hired three statisticians in the past three years, he said.

“The fact that we hired three new faculty for stats, even though the department itself is not particularly growing, shows we’re moving resources from the math side to the stats side,” Wolpert said.

Though computer science is the fastest-growing STEM major at this university, Wolpert said statistics is gaining popularity as students realize “the need is going to be even greater in the future than today, and it’s going to play an ever-increasing role in both science and commercial enterprises.”

Junior Daniel Kendix, a computer science major who is minoring in statistics, said it seems as though statistics is the most practical field in mathematics to study.

“It has the most applications to the real world,” Kendix said. “Whenever I read the paper, I see a bunch of statistics from all over the place that are used to prove either side of the story. By getting a better understanding of statistics, I can form my own opinions and find out which side of the story is true.”

Of the statistics degrees earned nationwide, ASA found that women held 45 percent of them.

“It makes sense intuitively to me that this is a field that’s attractive to females,” Wolpert said. “I’m speculating, but because it’s a newer field, there’s not a set stereotype of what a statistician is, so the field can appear more open. When you say engineer, many people have a set image of what an engineer looks like, and that works against recruiting.”

“There are definitely more girls in my stats classes than the pure math classes,” senior Sophy Yang, an economics and mathematics major, wrote in an email.

The demand for statisticians is on the rise, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 27 percent jump in employment for statisticians from 2012 to 2022, according to its 2014-2015 Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Comparatively, the average percent change predicted for all occupations is 11 percent, according to the report.

Morganstein called upon a quote from a 19th-century mathematical physicist to express the importance of utilizing statistics in light of the growth in big data and the heavy emphasis on data-driven decision-making in fields from business to government to medicine.

“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it,” Morgansteinsc said, quoting Baron William Thomson Kelvin. “But when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”