Statistics education at all levels, school, undergraduate, graduate, and in the workplace, has been the subject of much debate over most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Proposals to make statistics a part of everyone’s basic education surfaced in the 1930s and 1940s, but gained little traction. World War II forced a renewed emphasis on scientific thinking and statistics gained attention as an essential component of applied science and industrial management. This led to the few existing graduate programs in statistics being expanded and new ones being developed at various universities around the world, a trend that went on for about the subsequent forty years. Some of these programs emphasized application and some theory, but as the need for statistics in many different fields (business, engineering, health sciences, social sciences, to name a few) became essential and the advent of electronic computing made it possible to meet those needs, graduate programs in statistics tended to merge toward a combination of application and theory, a very healthy trend indeed.