One in a series of articles profiling university programs focusing on big data and analytics education.

The management information systems master’s degree program at Texas Tech University began in 1968, one of the earliest in the country. When it started, students learned applied business programming in languages like Basic and COBOL.

Four years ago, the program in Lubbock, Texas, began offering a concentration in business analytics in response to employers who said they needed skilled professionals to make sense of the mountains of data they had collected.