Unlike UCI, UCD, UCSD there appears to be no data science major and no statistics major at UCSC. However, they do have a new data science center at UCSC. For a prospective undergraduate student interested in data science (e.g. has taken data science classes online) - would it be best they just didn’t go to UCSC? Or might there be a way to say, through a computer science degree, that they could get to the same educational ends?
My kid is a CS/DS intent at UC-Berkeley, and the overlap between CS and DS is still pretty great. To become a double major means taking as few as 5 courses extra that doesn’t overlap with CS. So I would think that being a CS major, with adding data science and calculus-based statistics classes, would pretty much cover the same material. It’s a very evolving field (just became a major at Berkeley last year), so it’s likely it could be added as a major soon.