The Role of Academia in Data Science Education

Abstract

As the demand for data scientists continues to grow, universities are trying to figure out how to best contribute to the training of a workforce. However, there does not appear to be a consensus on the fundamental principles, expertise, skills, or knowledge-base needed to define an academic discipline. We argue that data science is not a discipline but rather an umbrella term used to describe a complex process involving not one data scientist possessing all the necessary expertise, but a team of data scientists with nonoverlapping complementary skills. We provide some recommendations for how to take this into account when designing data science academic programs.Keywords: applied statistics, data science, data science curriculum, data wrangling, machine learning, software engineering