Bachelor of Arts in Data Science

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Current students follow degree requirements in effect for the academic year they began their studies at USC.  If you are a current student, please refer to your STARS report or the appropriate USC Catalogue for your year.  Students seeking to advance their catalogue year to follow updated curricula may contact their department advisor.

Program Director: Emilio Ferrara, PhD

Computer-based information systems facilitate, enable and often define the relationships between corporations and consumers, buyers and suppliers, businesses of all sizes, social networks and citizens and their governments. Understanding these relationships and effectively addressing the collection, flow and distribution of information is vital to the effectiveness of any modern organization, enterprise or government agency.

The Bachelor of Arts in Data Science is a cooperative degree program involving the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Students complete 128 units, including at least 70 units of courses in Dornsife College and at least 38 units of courses in Viterbi School of Engineering. Units completed in Viterbi include the basic programming and data science requirements while units completed in Dornsife College include the general education and writing requirements, the Dornsife College foreign language requirement and an adviser-approved disciplinary specialization of at least 24 units, (including at least 16 units of upper-division course work).

The specialization must form a coherent focus on a discipline that provides students with insight into a domain in which data science can be usefully applied; this is normally another departmental or interdepartmental major for the BA degree, permitting students to satisfy most or all of the requirements for a double major (see Undergraduate Degree Programsfor rules governing the overlap of courses allowed for a double major).

The program teaches students to understand, design and implement effective solutions to meet organizational, societal and management needs for information and decision support.

All students undertaking this degree program must have knowledge of the following areas (the core):

  • Information systems and technology fundamentals
  • Programming basics
  • Statistics
  • Data management
  • Machine learning
  • Data visualization
Published on July 19th, 2018Last updated on August 6th, 2026