“We’ve seen over the years in the MBA program the interest has changed a lot more to MBA students being interested in data-driven analytical decision making,” says Vedat Verter, an operations management professor at McGill. “They [students] were asking for courses in analytics, and to a large extent we looked at the market trends, and we saw the gap between the supply and the demand for more analytically-oriented managers.”

“This gained more and more importance as data became more available to governments, companies and academics. Analytics is not a new field of science; it’s a combination of statistics, computer science, information systems and operational research,” explains Demetrios Vakratsas, the vice-dean of programs at Desautels. “It highlights the interdependencies between these fields rather than the fields working in silos. It’s a new science that has developed, putting more emphasis on the integration.”

Source: Business schools heed the call for more data-literate graduates – The Globe and Mail