This is a follow up to my previous article on the times taken to qualify as a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA).

Below is a comparison of the distribution of travel time to Fellowship of all 307 new Fellows in the sample with the distribution of the subset of 123 (out of the 307) who had taken an actuarial science degree or an actuarial science masters (or both).

The differences are very small.

The conclusion is that there is no evidence (at least from this sample of 307 Fellows) that actuarial science graduates or masters students qualify any quicker than students who do other degrees and don't do an actuarial science masters.

This is likely to be of concern both to the IFoA and the universities offering such courses. Once again I urge the IFoA to be transparent and publish a detailed study using its full dataset.