How Much is a Data Science Course?

This is a tricky question, as the answer can be a quarter of a million dollars and up—or it can be free. To make sense of this enormous range, you ought perhaps to consider what you’ll get for your money in each of these scenarios. You get what you pay for is an old adage, and it can be seen to apply in the present case. 

The Most Expensive Option: University Data Science Programs

The most traditional way to break into data science is to earn a college degree in the subject, or in an adjacent subject such as statistics or computer science. A bachelor’s degree in data science requires four years to complete, and, like all college degrees today, will end up costing a small fortune. Recent estimates place a price tag of more than $100,000 on an in-state public university education, and one closer to $250,000 for one at a private university. Many data science professionals hold master’s degrees, and sometimes even PhDs in the field, which will involve a further outlay of ducats (although the doctoral degree will usually involve some kind of fellowship that will offset some of the expense.)

That’s an awful lot of money, and even financially comfortable families frequently end up having to borrow money to put their children through college. What do you get in exchange? A four-year college degree, for starters. Many jobs (although not as many as you might think) require that credential on your resume. What kind of an education you’ll receive in exchange for all that money is, however, open to debate. Time was that, if you went to college, you emerged with a knowledge of history, literature, general science, and, if you had a good ear, the ability to speak a foreign language, all of which was considered the makings of a well-rounded individual. Today, a four-year undergraduate program in data science will see you working very hard on the scientific part of your education, with plenty of classes in computer science and programming in multiple languages, statistics, higher mathematics, and machine learning. There’ll probably be some classes in the humanities mixed in with that, but those probably won’t be enough to give you the knowledge you need to pass the test to get on Jeopardy!.

Note that community colleges do sometimes offer AS degrees in data science. These are more affordable: you only need two years, and 2023 figures put tuition (excluding fees) at just above $2000 per semester if you’re attending an in-district public community college. That’s still a significant piece of change, but it’s going to come out costing a tenth of what a state college would for four years. The only problem is that AS degrees in data science are a fairly new innovation, and their effectiveness on the job market has yet to be determined. 

A Smaller Investment: Immersive Career-Focused Classes

More time-tested is the bootcamp or the certificate program that, in one to six months, will give you the education you need to secure an entry-level job in data science. You’ll be starting at the very beginning on the job front, but a professional development program such as Noble Desktop offers will set you on a data science or analytics career path. The prices here are far, far less intimidating than those of a four-year education, but they can still be substantial in their own right. You’ll find bootcamps that charge close to $20,000, and others that cost closer to $5,000, and you may not find that much difference between the programs, despite the wildly varying price points. Most schools offer some type of financing to go with their bootcamps; many of these are installment plans, sometimes for up to twelve months, and they often come at 0% interest. (Downside: the individual payments are pretty hefty.) Longer financing through third-party lenders is sometimes available as well, and, although students at professional schools are not eligible for the same kind of government loan programs that college students enjoy (if that’s the word), you’ll still be saddling yourself with debt you’ll have to pay back in the early years of your data science career.

Still, bootcamps and certificate programs give you a lot of educational bang for your buck. If you’re in a hurry, have ruled out college, or simply can’t afford a university degree, they may offer you the best way to acquire a data science toolkit that you can bring to the job market.

Less Expensive: Live Training Classes 

Although a certificate program or bootcamp is the minimum education you’re going to require to secure an entry-level data science role, there are briefer classes, often in the most introductory topics, that you can take, and that will start you on the road to a data science career. You’re going to end up having to take a fair number of these to equal a bootcamp education, but the pace is often slower, and you’ll have time between classes to let the individual curricula sink in before tackling the next one. This à la carte approach may work well for some students, although, in the aggregate, it will cost more than doing it all in one fell swoop.

The other reason you might want to take an individual class, say in elementary Python for data science, is that you’re not entirely sure that you want to spend the rest of your professional life as a data scientist or analyst. A single class is a plausible way to test the proverbial waters, and to spare you from making a substantial investment in a bootcamp that you’ll never end up using professionally. These individual classes, which usually span anything from a few days to a week, are also a great deal more reasonably priced than bootcamp tuition. Individual classes can cost in the hundreds rather than the thousands. There’s still a financial risk, of course, but you’re putting a far smaller amount of money on the line, and you stand to get quite a bit in return: the knowledge of whether or not data science is something you should pursue.

Somewhat Hors Concours: On-Demand Classes 

On-demand classes occupy a somewhat ambiguous position in the scheme of data science education. They can be quite exhaustive and cover all the ground a bootcamp covers, and they offer an incomparable degree of freedom and convenience when it comes to when and where you can study. All that should sound terrific, but it comes at the price of not having a human instructor to whom you can address your questions (although some of the pricier on-demand courses do include some kind of support from a fellow Homo sapiens.) You also run the risk of out-of-date information in your tutorials: data science is a rapidly evolving field, and what was cutting-edge a couple of years ago can easily be obsolete today.

The prices of on-demand classes vary substantially: some can cost as much as a live bootcamp, while a subscription to on-demand course provider Udemy allows you access to all their classes (including the one on how to clip your dog’s nails) can cost less than a dollar a day. Completing even a long Udemy class in data science probably won’t get you hired as a data scientist, but these courses aren’t without their usefulness. They make good refreshers and sometimes effective adjuncts to your live in-person training, especially for the live courses that don’t offer classroom recordings for your extended reference. For twenty bucks a month, you can probably afford to jump around through the Udemy catalog, fill in any gaps you might have in your data science knowledge, and maybe even unwind with the class in how to do card tricks.

The Price is Right: Free Resources

If the professionally curated on-demand class is only of moderate usefulness to your plans to obtain a position in data science, what’s to be gained from the sundry data science tutorials available on YouTube? True, the price can’t be beat, but you can usually only get very little for nothing, and these classes are no exception. Some of them can be useful (such as the sample classes available from Noble Desktop and other IT schools), but others are out-of-date or too brief actually to be helpful if you’re trying to learn data science on a professional level.

The one way in which these free resources can help you is before you commit hard-earned cash to study data science. Since they cost nothing, you risk nothing by watching a few of them (steer yourself toward the ones of more recent vintage) and getting a feel for what data science is going to be like. You may absolutely hate it, and have learned early on the very important lesson that you should look for another career path to pursue. Or you may really like it, and thus approach a bootcamp or individual class with the enthusiasm you’ll need to get your way through an arduous certificate program.

Learn Data Science Skills with Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop is able to offer its New York City-based classes to the rest of the world thanks to the wonders of the internet. It boasts a catalog of data science classes that ranges from a Data Analytics Certificate program that will guide you from your first statistical steps in Excel all the way through to machine learning and using Tableau to create compelling data visualizations to show to people who wouldn’t know a standard deviation from a social deviant. You’ll need close to six weeks to complete the course full-time, or upwards of six months if you’re taking the certificate program part-time. You’ll also need close to $5,000 for tuition, although a number of financing schemes is available.

Noble Desktop makes many of the components of the Data Analytics Certificate program available in smaller packages. The Python portion of the curriculum, in particular, can be taken as the Python for Data Science Bootcamp, and, then, once you know your way around the language’s spam and eggs, as the Python Machine Learning Bootcamp. You can even take the Tableau module independently. Noble Desktop, therefore, allows you to construct just the curriculum you require, given what you already know and what you need to know. You thus have a choice between the in-depth certificate programs and the flexibility of ordering your training à la carte. Tuition for the Python for Data Science Bootcamp is approximately $1500, while the Python for Machine Learning Bootcamp costs closer to $2,000.

All Noble Desktop’s data science classes include a one-year free retake option that truly is free, as well as recordings of all the classes you attend so you can go back over material you didn’t quite understand the first time. These recordings remain available for thirty days. Noble’s cutting-edge workbooks and classroom materials will be yours to take home for future reference at the end of the course. You’ll also receive 1-to-1 mentoring sessions (the longer the course, the more sessions to which you’ll be entitled) that can be used as you choose, be it to go over something technical, to curate your portfolio, or to work on your job-search materials.