Preach. After getting my PhD (and working narrowly through R), I’ve had to learn data analysis via programming all over again to catch up on what I lost. Fortunately the community is fantastic, so there are lots of people to throw you water as you run down the track. But at this pace of development higher education will not be a viable path to data analysis.

Which is a shame, because the value of a PhD is in being able to think critically and identify problems. If statistics is about identifying correlations, the goal of a PhD is to understand cause. So we could enter an environment where the technical skills to process large amounts of data and the experience to insightfully think through them could divorce.