I believe very strongly that a course in the analysis and processing of data is of absolutely central importance in a majority of disciplines.
Life is involved with observing our universe.
Our observations are, in general, in the form of a discrete set of numbers that we have to learn how to understand. Involved in this interpretation is a particularly important task, the identification and separation of signal from noise. This quest is, to all intents and purposes, paradoxical. The paradox is precisely that what is signal to one may be noise to one's brethren. Signal and noise vary in time and frequency content from discipline to discipline.