Kaplan Launch New Data Science Course in New York this September

VentureBeat reported recently that Kaplan, a company that provides higher education and test preparation material, will be introducing its first data science bootcamp in New York City this September.

The company will accept 10 to 20 students that will be trained over a period of 12 weeks by two data scientists from Datascope Analytics (a Chicago based data science consultancy). The course is designed to give students skills in web scraping, regression, the Naïve Bayes algorithm, and unsupervised machine learning.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Jason Moss, Kaplan’s vice president of stategy said,

“We are still a new business, and we are committed to getting it right, and committed to ensuring we can deliver upon the outcomes, so it’s not a question about how much money we can put into something, this is about ensuring the quality.”

“When we know we get that right, then I think you’ve got a $2 billion company that is behind that. The plan is to grow, and the plan is to scale. There’s a lot of support across all levels of Kaplan. In the future, they are fully expected in many more markets, etc.”

Although Kaplan’s move into data science training comes at a time where data scientists are needed across all industry verticals, the company is not the first to offer such courses. Insight Data Science, Data Science Retreat, Zipfian Academy, Insight Data Engineering, and The Data Incubator are all offering courses to meet the demand for data scientists.

However, as VentureBeat point out, the companies offering data science courses are small in number – for beginners, Zipfian Academy and Insight Data Engineering are the only choice, while Insight Data Science and The Data Incubator require people with advance degrees. Kaplan, on the other hand, say that applicants are required to have statistics and coding experience, with good communications skills playing a key role also.

The programme at Kaplan will cost $14,000.