Educating the 'big data' generation

MIT's big-data education programs have involved numerous partners in the technology industry, including IBM, which began its involvement in big data education about four years ago.

IBM revealed to Fortune that it plans to expand its academic partnership program by launching new academic programs and new curricula with more than twenty business schools and universities, to begin in the fall. To date, IBM has invested more than $24 billion in R&D and acquisitions to build the company's capabilities around big data and analytics, and it employs about 15,000 consultants and 400 mathematicians to focus exclusively on the area.

Business analytics is now a nearly $16 billion business for the company, IBM says -- which might be why it is interested in cultivating partnerships with more than 1,000 institutions of higher education to drive curricula focused on data-intensive careers.

The W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University launched a Master of Science in Business Analytics degree in 2013 and is now adding a Bachelor of Science in Data Analytics program as well. ASU started its master's program small, with an initial cohort of five students last fall. It has matriculated 100 and is shooting for two groups of 50 by 2015. Meanwhile, the number of applications to the master's program has jumped from 159 in 2013 to 298 applications as of early May.