UA trustees, governor back data science program

FAYETTEVILLE — A planned data science bachelor’s degree program at the University of Arkansas has the support of Gov. Asa Hutchinson and business leaders.

The University of Arkansas board approved the degree program Friday for a start date in fall 2020, but still pending is a review by the state Division of Higher Education.

Hutchinson, in a letter of support for the program, cited the mandatory computer science education in the state’s high schools, an initiative he championed.

“UAF offering a [bachelor of science] in Data Science would allow students to continue their Computer Science and Data Science education at the collegiate level, attract out-of-state talent that would diversify UAF’s student body, and benefit Arkansas businesses by supplying them with a technically-trained workforce ready to meet the demands of an increasingly digital world,” Hutchinson stated in the April letter.

Nationally, as recently as 2012 “there were very, very few, if any, undergraduate pathways and programs” in data science, said Brian Fitzgerald, chief executive officer for the Business-Higher Education Forum, a membership organization of business leaders and college presidents.

The Washington-based organization in 2017 described a national shortage of job candidates with skill in data science and analytics, issuing a report with professional services firm PwC calling for investment in “market-driven programs that link learning with work.”

Fitzgerald said about four or five years ago “just a handful of institutions” had data science programs.

Since then, “I think the big trend is in the undergraduate space,” Fitzgerald said. Under- graduate degrees, minors and concentrations in data science “have grown exponentially,” Fitzgerald said.

UA sought feedback from businesses to gauge the demand for students with undergraduate training in data science. Several businesses responded to an employer needs survey, including Tyson Foods and Walmart, according to the proposal documents. The proposal documents state out of 11 survey respondents, six stated “yes” when asked if they would give hiring preference to students with a bachelor’s degree in data science while five said “maybe” to the same question.

John English, dean of UA’s College of Engineering, said “it’s been a clear voice from industry” there’s “high demand for data scientists, driven by things like data analytics, cybersecurity, anyplace you find massively large data sets.”

Documents describe the UA data science degree program as a partnership with the university’s engineering, business and arts and sciences colleges. It’s designed to be a hub-and-spoke model of learning, with a core data science curriculum and then concentrations in areas including biomedical and health care informatics, business data analytics and computational analytics.

Chancellor Joe Steinmetz told trustees Thursday the degree program is “a unique degree for us,” calling it “probably the first time” three colleges have collaborated for a single degree.

“We brought in a panel

from industry and from business to help shape the degree,” Steinmetz added.

Fifty students are projected to enroll as freshmen in the program’s first year, according to documents prepared for trustees.

While the degree proposal documents state there are no similar undergraduate programs in the state, the University of Central Arkansas offers a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with a concentration in data science. Other schools, including the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, offer graduate programs in data science, and UALR also offers a bachelor’s degree in information science.

Creating a UA bachelor’s degree in data science would involve developing 17 courses, according to the proposal. Documents described six tenure-track faculty — two apiece from the engineering, business, and arts and sciences colleges at UA — as “new” faculty, but some of the faculty to be involved may already be at UA.

The six faculty positions will “come from a combination of existing faculty whose roles may change or new faculty who would be hired into ‘lines’ (positions) vacated by faculty who leave, or newly created faculty positions,” Karl Schubert, an engineering research professor and leader

of the data science program’s curriculum team, said.

English said UA has “been building years for this.”

“It’s not like, ‘OK, now we start hiring.’ I think we’re well positioned on it, and we’ll be hiring more, too,” English said.

Fitzgerald said UA is taking “a very sound approach” to the design of its planned data science bachelor’s degree program. He said enrollments elsewhere show student demand for such data science opportunities.

“I think the University of Arkansas is positioning itself very well to meet the demand of students across the country for majors and minors like this,” Fitzgerald said.