Hire a computational social scientist! Wait, who?

An article on Towards data science by Chris Dowsett discusses the advantages of hiring a computational social scientist. But are there academic programs to deliver these new professionals?

Gender pay-balance model (D. Secchi)

The article "Could a Computational Social Scientist be Your Next Best Hire?" by Chris Dowsett is refreshing for all social simulation modelers, because it highlights some of the aspects that put social science students ahead of engineers and other hard science students when it comes to social issues.

What makes the article interesting is that it is full of statements and claims that are usually heard in the corridor of academic events like the annual Social Simulation Conference.

For example, highlighting that a social scientist who knows programming and coding may be more useful to a company than someone who only knows the former of the two. For example, he states:

The difference between a computational Social Scientist and a Data Scientist is that the Social Scientist is an expert in studying human behavior and finding patterns in data about population groups.

But, of course,

That’s not to say one is better than the other. They’re complementary.

Nevertheless, the author of this article indicates that computational social scientists are the third group of people businesses should hire:

I would argue there’s a third important group that are the Computational Social Scientists — professionals with the technical skills to process large amounts of data and the knowledge set that helps them identify behavior patterns among groups of people.

Now, the question...

The above is very encouraging and I could not agree more. However, from where should computational social scientist come from? Are there academic programs to form them?

Now, this is the real problem, because most of the programs are tied to PhD students and taught mostly in graduate summer schools. The only Master program that is specifically targeted to form computational social scientists is the one at the University of Surrey.

So, the point here is that, of course, I agree that a computational social scientist would be an incredible hire for any business. But the reality is that academic institutions have not started to create programs to satisfy this need.