Description: On April 22, 2025, the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and the Illinois State University (ISU) Actuarial Program held an Actuarial Day for high school and college students on the ISU campus. It was part of a series of such events that the SOA sponsors and helps organize on college campuses to inspire future generations of actuaries and popularize the actuarial profession among high school and college students.

Description: A description of a new award for outstanding educators in actuarial science.

Description: News release announcing York University in Canada has received the CAE designation.

Description: Schaumburg, IL, June 23, 2022 – The Society of Actuaries (SOA) has recognized Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara) in the U.S., as Centers of Actuarial Excellence (CAE). These two universities join the ranks of 35 other CAEs around the world.

Description: The University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing has been named a new SOA Center of Actuarial Excellence (CAE).

Description: Expanding Horizons recently had the opportunity to interview Wenjun Zhu, the winner of the Society of Actuaries’ (SOA’s) third Actuarial Science Early Career Award.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is dedicated to advancing education and research for the actuarial profession. As part of its mission, the SOA recognizes the importance of partnering with colleges and universities to help develop future actuaries. With this in mind, the SOA’s Research Department is holding a Student Research Case Study Challenge, which provides an opportunity for teams of students to apply their actuarial skills on a real-world problem in a business setting.

Description: News release announcing the On-Campus Testing Program

Description: News release announcing the winners of the 2025 Student Research Case Study Challenge