Looking at the curriculum CMU has put together (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curriculum https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intellig

Looking at the curriculum CMU has put together (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curriculum https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curricu...), I see statistical fundamentals in the Math and Statistics Core. I expect it should handle the why and the how. (... though I get the sense from the outside looking in that a lot of machine learning at this point is still a little bit alchemy, so there may not always even be a firm "why" answer to give. All the more reason to give students firm general fundamental groundings so they can seek out those answers).