> I feel like Data Science is not a real academic field, and it's not something you need a college degree in.

Its an emergent academic field in the way that bioinformatics was a few years ago; "data science" is a name for something that's been taught in less breadth and depth as parts of other academic disciplines (including parts of the "research methods" curriculum in the life and social sciences, parts of statistics, parts of computer science), but certainly its as legitimate an area of focus as the disciplines its that parts of it have been hosted in. There's more than one way to divide up intellectual pursuit, and a number of ways that have cut across the previously predominant divisions have been coming to the fore recently. This is, really, a good thing.

Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Data Science is really a "horizontal", not a "vertical" in academia, to borrow business jargon. It's an interdisciplinary research skill set that students and scholars across academic disciplines should be trained in. As such, I'm not convinced it needs its own degree programs, though.

I think the quality of work being done in the disciplines you call "verticals" is improved by increasing the degree of development in the "horizontals" -- and that includes recognizing that those "horizontals" are legitimate fields of focus on their own, because the further development and focus on the "horizontal" feeds back into the tool sets available to all the "verticals" the "horizontal" touches.