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Re:Berkeley offers its data science course online for free by QML on Thursday April 05, 2018 @08:22PM (#16769999)
I think it’s because data science has a more immediate, broader applicability than computer science. Not everybody needs to know how to program a full application; but they should be able to load in a dataset and statistically analyze it. Looking at the type of people taking Data 8 compared to CS61A (the introductory programming course), I would say the former is a fairly diverse crowd (political science majors, economics majors, biology majors, etc.)

It is also a possibility that Data Science is an easier topic to learn than Computer Science, and thus more popular.

Re:Berkeley offers its data science course online for free by itronitron on Thursday April 05, 2018 @11:56PM (#16770777)
It might be more popular as many data science courses use Python and therefore students don't have to get their code to compile.

Seriously though, I think people are drawn to data science out of a desire to create stories with some underlying support (data/evidence) in order to influence policy or business decisions.

Re:Berkeley offers its data science course online for free by Ar-Curunir on Friday April 06, 2018 @01:42AM (#16771143)
61A also uses Python.