I disagree. Statistics is not "losing image" among students. It's the other way around: more and more students and software developers have become interested

I disagree. Statistics is not "losing image" among students. It's the other way around: more and more students and software developers have become interested in statistics, inspired by the successes achieved by machine learning and AI researchers. Because machine leaning is statistical learning. It's almost impossible to build a machine learning system without learning at least some statistics! As evidence of the growing popularity of statistics, consider that this submission made the front page on HN. The "losing image" meme applies, not to the discipline of statistics, but to staid academic departments who have lost power and prestige. They don't like that their subject has become popular in a different department (CS), outside their purview. PS. I would add that many (but not all) statistics departments have brought this upon themselves. For a long time, their approach to real-world, practical applications has been to apply existing models in ways that can be readily interpreted by human beings, e.g., with "explanatory variables." Meanwhile, machine learning and AI researchers have been experimenting with, testing, and deploying new models and new ways of 'scaling up' old models, focused on making accurate predictions on previously-unseen data. Of course students find the latter more exciting.