A new bachelor's degree in statistics and data science has been approved at Cal U. The B.S. in Statistics and Data Science begins in Fall 2018.
Cal U will be adding a new undergraduate degree to its academic lineup this fall: The B.S. in Statistics and Data Science was approved Jan. 25 by the Board of Governors for Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education.
Students in the four-year Statistics and Data Science program will learn to manage
and analyze "big data" - the estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of information being
generated each day.
Companies such as Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Spotify were among the first to harness
this deluge of data to provide tailored content, advertising and personalized experiences
for their customers, says program coordinator Dr. Melissa Sovak.
Now big data is driving growth and competition in industries from finance and insurance
to manufacturing, retail trade and professional services.
Cal U's hybrid degree program in Statistics and Data Science includes on-campus and
online courses that address the nationwide shortage of professionals who are skilled
in data science, one of the country's fastest-growing occupations.
Payscale.com, which boasts the world's largest database of individual salary profiles,
lists "data analyst" among its top in-demand occupations. And the McKinsey Global
Institute's 2017 report on big data predicts that data science jobs in the United
States will exceed 490,000 this year, with a shortage of more than 250,000 skilled
professionals to fill them.
Students who enroll in Cal U's Statistics and Data Science program will be poised
to fill this skills gap. The program offers in-depth training in the tools used to
analyze and manage data, including software by SAS®, a recognized world leader in
business analytics software and services.
As part of Cal U's new degree program, students will use real-world data and the same
SAS® software employed in 80,000 workplaces around the world to earn a 15-credit SAS®
Data Science certificate.
The program also includes applied education in Base SAS for data analysis, data cleaning
and data preparation; SAS Visual Analytics to visualize data; SAS with Hadoop for
processing and storing big data sets; R software for statistical computing and graphics,
the Python programming language for statistical modeling; and Tableau for tasks such
as identifying statistical trends.
As Sovak says, "It's really cutting-edge in terms of filling industry needs."
Before graduating from Cal U, students in the Statistics and Data Science program
complete a senior capstone project to demonstrate their knowledge and skills through
the application of key data science methods.Students can apply to Cal U now to secure
a place in the Statistics and Data Science program, which begins in the Fall 2018
semester.
To learn more about the program, contact the Undergraduate Admissions Office.
Learn about Cal U's SAS Data Science Graduate Certificate and SAS Data Science Undergraduate Certificate.