The education of actuarial students has been a problem for the profession almost since its inception. Despite considerable efforts to seek improvements, difficulties have repeatedly arisen in the examinations, the syllabus and the teaching.

Over the past five years the profession has identified four major areas of concern:

—The average time to qualification of those who complete the exams is too long.

—The proportion of entrants who never qualify is too high.

—It is becoming difficult to recruit enough students to produce the required number of qualified actuaries 4–10 years later.

—There are insufficient actuaries available to fulfil the tutoring and examining duties required by the education service.

The first three of these points can be illustrated by considering a single cohort. In 1980, 289 students enrolled in the Institute. Only 5% of these had completed the exams within 4 years, and only 14% within 5 years. It is unlikely that more than about 30% of this cohort will ever qualify. Incidentally, much of the careers literature available to these students indicated that a diligent (but not extraordinary) student could expect to qualify in 3 or 4 years.