Master of Science in Business Analytics

LEAD THE WORLD IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS TO PRODUCE SOLUTIONS AND CHANGE HOW ORGANIZATIONS FUNCTION

• Become a data analyst ready to analyze and to visualize data for strategic decision making 
• Study contemporary data analyst skills from content derived from leading, global organizations
• Study consumers’ buying habits to help businesses make more strategic decisions about how they market their products and services. 
• Master the process of gleaning insights from data to inform better business decisions

The Masters of Science in Business Analytics is designed to prepare learners for data analyst careers.  A data analyst finds a solution to a problem or provides an answer to a question.  This career tasks a data analyst to gather, purify, and analyze data sets.  Contemporary data analysts work in a variety of fields, including government, business, finance, law enforcement, and science.

Imagine a career in which you tackle some of the following questions.  What types of clients ought a company to focus on in its upcoming advertising campaign? Which age range is most susceptible to a specific disease? What behavioral trends are associated with financial fraud?

Here’s what many data analysts do on a day-to-day basis:

•  Gather data: Analysts often collect data themselves. This could include conducting surveys, tracking visitor characteristics on a company website, or buying datasets from data collection specialists.
•  Clean data: Raw data might contain duplicates, errors, or outliers. Cleaning the data means maintaining the quality of data in a spreadsheet or through a programming language so that your interpretations won’t be wrong or skewed. 
•  Model data: This entails creating and designing the structures of a database. You might choose what types of data to store and collect, establish how data categories are related to each other, and work through how the data actually appears.
•  Interpret data: Interpreting data will involve finding patterns or trends in data that could answer the question at hand.
•  Present: Communicating the results of your findings will be a key part of your job. You do this by putting together visualizations like charts and graphs, writing reports, and presenting information to interested parties.

Length of program: 16 months, 33 credit hours

Entry terms: Fall

Program delivery: on-campus 

Cost of program: $40,390 or $1,200/credit

Job Outlook

The average base salary for a data analyst in the US is $69,517 in December 2021, according to Glassdoor. This can vary depending on your seniority, where in the US you’re located, and other factors. Data analysts are in high demand. The World Economic Forum listed it as number two in growing jobs in the US. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reports related occupations as having extremely high growth rates.

From 2020 to 2030, operations research analyst positions are expected to grow by 25 percent, market research analysts by 22 percent, and mathematicians and statisticians by 33 percent. That’s a lot higher than the total employment growth rate of 7.7 percent.

As advancing technology has rapidly expanded the types and amount of information we can collect, knowing how to gather, sort, and analyze data has become a crucial part of almost any industry. You’ll find data analysts in the criminal justice, fashion, food, technology, business, environment, and public sectors—among many others.

Data analyst vs. data scientist: What’s the difference?

Data analysts and data scientists both work with data, but what they do with it differs. Data analysts typically work with existing data to solve defined business problems. Data scientists build new algorithms and models to make predictions about the future.

What types of jobs can I get with a MSBA degree?

People who perform data analysis might have other titles such as:

• Market Research Analyst

• Business Analyst 

• Operations Research Analyst

• Data Analyst

• Medical/Health Care Analyst
• Management Consulting