Comment by shmorkin
6 days ago
This exists already at Northeastern. They have a data science major and minor with a much more 'practical' intro sequence that teaches in Python. I actually TA'd for it, and many of the students were business or life sciences majors going for a data science minor. It even came with a 1-credit practicum geared towards specific domains, which students could choose from.
I live in California and I recently read an article from the perspective of Berkeley's CS department explaining why they don't take transfer credits from high schoolers who took AP CS or AP Stats -- they're just not "real" Computer Science, but rather applied programming.
Even when I was an undergrad (1995-1999) and a grad student (2008-2011) everyone knew that CS was a research science [that happened to turn out people who lucratively employable skills], and not a software engineering program, which existed separately at both schools.
That uses to be called CIS. When I was at Harvard they still took the algorithms class. Yeah, it was the ezmode version, but it still covered stuff like how to build a hash table and a trie.