You Can Bet Other UC Chancellors Are Paying Attention

UC-Berkeley gets front-page PR in LA where the Regents are meeting this week:

From the LA Times: ...UC Berkeley’s faculty and students are marshaling the vast power of data science across myriad fields to address tough problems. And now the university is set to accelerate those efforts with a new college, its first in more than 50 years — and is providing free curriculum to help spread the gospel of data science to California community colleges, California State University and institutions across the nation and world. 

As data floods society faster than ever before, demand has surged for specialists who can organize and analyze it with coding skills, computing prowess and creative thinking. To meet the “insatiable demand,” as university officials put it, UC Berkeley will open a College of Computing, Data Science and Society. 

The University of California Board of Regents is expected to approve the plan Thursday, following approval by its Academic and Student Affairs Committee on Wednesday. A new college building is scheduled to open during the 2025-26 academic year and will house the data science major, first offered five years ago, with other degree programs in computer science, statistics, computational biology and computational precision health. Some of the programs will be run jointly with the Berkeley College of Engineering and UC San Francisco. UC Berkeley says no new state funds will be required; the campus has raised private funds for 14 new faculty positions and about $330 million so far in gifts for the new building...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-18/uc-berkeley-spreads-the-gospel-of-data-science-with-new-college-free-curriculum.