The University Senate approved the establishment of a business analytics master’s degree program for the University of Maryland in its general body meeting Thursday afternoon.
The program, which will take its first cohort in fall 2017, aims to fulfill the growing need for a workforce skilled in big-data analysis and will focus on courses based in math, statistics and computer skills, said Tunay Tunca, who will be the director of the master’s program.
“The topic of business analytics has been very hot in the industry in the last five to 10 years, and the industry is realizing how useful it is to use data analysis,” said Tunca, a management science and operations management professor. “Companies are looking for people who have skills in that.”
The proposal for this program came from the business school in November and was brought to the senate floor Thursday with unanimous support from the Programs, Curricula, & Courses Committee. The program now awaits approval from university President Wallace Loh, the University System of Maryland Board of Regents and the Maryland Higher Education Commission. Tunca expects the first cohort to have about 40 students, who can complete the program in 12 to 16 months. The program will be 30 credits, including core and elective classes and a capstone project.
The university currently offers undergraduate opportunities for similar studies, with a minor in business analytics and a major in operations management and business analytics, but the master’s program will increase opportunities for such studies, especially for students who might not have backgrounds in business, Tunca said.
“The master’s program is meant to be for people who have strong quantitative training, from engineering, math, statistics or business, but you have to be strong quantitatively,” Tunca said.
All but three Big Ten Conference universities — Rutgers, Michigan and Ohio State — offer a master’s or some type of graduate-level program in business analytics, and Tunca said the business school has been working on this program for the past five years.
“Masters of Science in business analytics programs are new; they are at most three to four years old, so there isn’t really any one that has become the model,” he said. “The thing is that the Smith School has very strong faculty in this subject. … We have the expertise and the ideas for how to design a program like this.”
Senior Abby Malkin, an operations management and business analytics major, said she has seen that the skills offered by this subject area are in high demand.
“I will be working for a consulting firm, and my specific role will be data intelligence consultant,” she said. “It was very helpful to have a business analytics degree. Those types of technologies, statistical tools, are important.”
Senior Ben Wills said he would recommend such a master’s program to people in the field, but he doesn’t expect to come back to school for something like that because he is finishing up his minor in business analytics.
“I think it’d be really helpful,” the finance major said. “A huge proportion of jobs being created in the business workforce need these analytical skills.”
Malkin said in a few years she would be interested in coming back to get her master’s degree in such a program because she found that side of her major to be much more interesting.
“Data analytics is a really big, up-and-coming field, because right now there’s a lot of technology and data,” she said. “The biggest thing we need to learn is how to clean that data and find what’s important from it.”
Tunca said he has consistently heard interest from students and employers in business analytics and said he’s looking forward to the fact that “we’ll be able to satisfy this enormous demand from both sides.”
The senate also approved a proposal to add a representative from the Division of Information Technology to the University Library Council on Thursday.
“It’s going to be very positive, both on the Smith School and the university,” Tunca said. “We’ll be able to get really good students and produce really good students that have these skills that are in demand by the industry.”
