Dartmouth has an article about its Program in Quantitative Social Science, “which launched as a major in 2015 and brings together scholars and students interested in examining social science questions through the application of statistical and mathematical tools. The program offers undergraduates a major and minor, both of which combine mathematical training with one or more of the social sciences.”
I think this is a great idea, with one proviso: Geeks love numbers so much that they (we?) can give them too much weight. There are aspects of social behavior that are hard, probably impossible, to quantify. The risk is that a data-first approach to social problems will ignore these aspects and draw conclusions based only on those things that we know how to measure. Economics fell into that trap, which is one of the reasons modern economies are so wildly unequal.
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