The Statistics programme is intended for those students who want to qualify as Statisticians. The mathematical content of some of the courses (e.g. Theoretical Statistics, Probability and Stochastic Processes, and Matrix Methods) is, of necessity fairly high, as students need to be able to understand the theoretical principals of the subject. Therefore, in addition to Statistics III, Mathematics II is required for admission. A small number of more applied subjects, such as Data Mining and Time Series Analyses, are also available as options.

The Population Studies programme is aimed at students who want to work in fields such as Demography or Population Statistics; a number of our graduates are employed, for example, by Statistics South Africa. Undergraduate Statistics is not a pre-requisite for admission to postgraduate Population Studies; instead, students with no statistical training are required to enrol in an Introductory Statistics course offered by the Department. Students are drawn from a diversity of undergraduate fields, including Statistics, Sociology, Economics, and Public Health. Courses in this subprogram include Official Statistics, Survey Methods and Demographic Analysis.