UC Berkeley to add new college to campus

BERKELEY, Calif. - UC Berkeley is establishing a new college on its campus for the first time in more than 50 years. 

On Thursday, the UC Board of Regents finalized the plans for the new UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS).

Computer science and data science majors, two of the most popular at the university, are among those that will get funneled into this college. The university said it's establishing the college in response to skyrocketing demand in the field.

"These interdisciplinary areas are often the most active areas of research, leading to some of the most exciting breakthroughs," added CDSS Associate Provost and Dean Jennifer Chayes.

The college will include the Data Science Undergraduate Studies program, Department of Statistics, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Center for Computational Biology, and Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet. 

The hope is that the new college will move into a new building called the Gateway that's scheduled to be ready for the 2025-26 academic year.

The new college goals are to help in developing and providing "ethics-oriented" solutions to societal problems. 

UC Berkeley last opened the previous colleges, the journalism school and public policy school, in 1968 and 1969 respectively.

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The announcement was acknowledged at the data science graduation Thursday, where Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan served as the keynote speaker.