I often receive flak for expressing a similar opinion when people express disappointment at CS not teaching them "how to code". Your tuition is best spent on conceptually difficult material, not stuff you can easily pick up on your own.
Whenever I talk to people about data science I repeat the old adage:
A data scientist is a statistician who can program or a programmer who understands statistics at a high level.
It's amazing how few CS people become data scientists, I think physics and economics degrees are the most common degrees among elite DSs I know.
but it actually makes a lot of sense - it's relatively easy to pick up coding. In fact, it could be the best-taught skill on the internet, there's no shortage of material for a person who wants to learn to code. I think that most CS people don't learn enough statistics to really pursue DS and a ton of people with advanced stats knowledge can pickup coding relatively easily.
Now when I talk to kids, I tell them that if they want to go to college, they should try to learn something they can't learn on their own.
