By 2021, job candidates who possess skills in data science and analytics — or DSA — will be more than twice as likely to be hired as those who don’t.
That’s according to an April 2017 Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) report titled “Investing in America’s Data Science and Analytics Talent: The Case for Action.”
In addition, only about one out of every four university leaders can guarantee that their graduates will have DSA skills, the report states.
The situation is even more acute among underrepresented minority students; only 12 percent of university presidents and provosts agree that DSA courses attract more underrepresented minority students than other STEM courses, according to the report.
Dr. Brandeis Marshall, an associate professor and chair of computer and information sciences at Spelman College, is on a mission to turn those statistics around.
With a $480,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Marshall is leading a project to train faculty at Spelman and Morehouse College — two HBCUs in Atlanta — on how to make DSA a more prominent feature of their courses. The project also seeks to raise awareness of DSA among students who are underrepresented in the discipline at the undergraduate level in order to prepare them for graduate studies or corporate positions in data science.
Marshall says the project will ultimately benefit employers and students alike, and college is the place to start.
