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Focuses on the challenges in teaching short statistics courses by the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida from 1991 to 1994. Reduced state funding for education; Necessity of coming up with external sources of funding; Development of a program called `Week of Short Courses' which was used to generate additional revenue.

The housing unit (HU) method is often characterized as inferior to other methods for estimating the population of states and local areas. We believe this characterization must be challenged. In this article we evaluate population estimates produced by the housing unit method and by three other commonly used methods: component II, ratio correlation, and administrative records. Basing our analysis on 1980 census data from 67 counties in Florida and testing for precision, bias, and the distribution of errors, we find our application of the HU method performs at least as well as the more highly acclaimed methods of local population estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]