The research found that 95 per cent of parents of private schoolchildren speak to their offspring about university, compared with about 90 per cent in the other categories. That doesn't seem a significant difference, certainly not something that would justify the time and expense involved in interviewing almost 2000 parents.

However, the discipline of statistics has a way of dealing with such a lightweight result; you put it on a line graph or a pie chart, carefully coloured so that it hits the eye. More importantly, you choose a scale that will make your point more forcefully. If you were to show 95 and 90 on a line that was two centimetres long, the difference would be insignificant; but change to a line 10 centimetres long and there is a noticeable disparity.

It seems to me that a much more significant finding implied in the figures is the fact that more than 90 per cent of all parents have ambitions that their children will attend university. Presumably the remaining 10 per cent will be required to build our houses, nanny our children, cook and serve our meals, police our streets, collect our garbage, drive our buses and trains, work in our factories, join our armed forces ...

We will not need to worry about jobs like driving taxis or checking train tickets or cleaning offices, because those positions will be filled by the overseas workers whom we have graciously allowed to stay in our country to share our good life.

As to what will happen to the favoured 90 per cent: no doubt their ambitious parents see them leading some future legal action against other university graduates who failed to recommend an expensive, publicly funded pathology for a medical condition. And, when all that dust has cleared and the legal bills are paid and the insurance premiums duly raised, another group of graduates, this time from the accountancy building, will be able to tot up the profit to all concerned and the cost to the public purse.

Of course, some of those 90 per cent of children we mentioned earlier will study engineering or architecture or science when they fulfil their parents' aspirations. So they will learn something useful and will not need to make their living sucking the public teat in the legal, medical and accountancy professions.

The problem with the engineering and science courses, however, is that they assume some facility with mathematics, which brings us back to the question of statistics again. We should not be too hard on the way it was used to tell us, with great earnestness, that parents want the best for their children. After all, in recent times, it provided an easy excuse for this country to change its leader; that it was only an excuse and not the real reason is irrelevant here, because I merely cite it as an example of the misuse of statistics.

Not that science is above using statistics in support of their own fairy stories. According to one theory, for example, there may have been more than one Big Bang; in fact, this theory says there could have been an infinite number of Big Bangs, each resulting in a different universe.

I don't want to take this idea further beyond saying that if science is prepared to say that there can be an infinite number of anythings, it has clearly lost its way. One of the things that the 90 per cent of students whose parents want them to go to university learn at school is that infinity is not a number and that, if you accept that it is, then all bets are off. You are on the same page as those who, when faced with some irrational element of religious belief, will reply that God can fix that problem because God is infinite.

All of this seems to be a long way from that Monash University study, but it is merely offered here as a caution about relying on statistics, or presenting them in a form that enhances your case more than it deserves. The wonderful Lewis Carroll, mathematician as well as story teller, put it well 150 years ago: "If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics – it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them."

Frank O'Shea is a Melbourne writer.