permaculture

[paul wheaton <paul@richsoil.com>]

My guess would be that there are about 75,000.

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> 
wrote:
> (from a conversation on another list; might be of general interest)
>
> A while back I saw a permie website that said there were a million PDC 
> grads, and that struck me as insanely high. So I did a little arithmetic, 
> and to get a million, given that the average PDC might have 25 students (I 
> think it is probably less), you'd need 40,000 PDCs, or 2000 PDCs per year 
> for the last 20 years. I can't conceive that there's been anything like 
> that number.
>
> There is a pretty standard way that mathematicians get ballpark numbers. 
> So: you work upwards, and figure that in the 1980s there may have been, 
> what, 20 PDCs per year (I think that's generous, over the whole decade), in 
> the 90s maybe 100 or 200 PDCs per year, and in the last decade, perhaps 400 
> per year (again, I think these are generous numbers),
>
> That yields a total of about 6000 PDCs, times 25 students, and that gives 
> you 150,000 PDC grads. I would consider that a maximum.
>
> This is why when people talk about the importance of intimate, small 
> courses, I get fidgety.That's terrible for 30 years. How about  PDCs in 100 
> universities with 500 students in each, like a Biology 101 survey class.
>
> Does anyone have a better handle on the numbers?
>
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com
>
>
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