I hope you are all having a good day. I currently hold a M.S. in applied economics and have worked as a data analyst (started at $55,000 in a small city). I am contemplating going back to school for either a PhD in economics or a PhD in statistics. I wanted to know if any of you have information on how job prospects change once you have a PhD and how salary expectations change in the private sector. My goal is to work in data science and make $130,000+ a year.
I have a PhD and I work in the private sector.
A PhD in statistics would be the more “traditional” route into data science, although data science isn’t really a traditional field. It’s not a well-defined area, and right now companies are so hungry for people to do some magic to the data they have that they are willing to hire anyone with a pulse who remotely looks like they might know what they are doing. So data scientists have PhDs and master’s degrees in all kinds of fields - quantitative social sciences, physical sciences, math and statistics, etc. You could be a data scientist with either a PhD in economics or a PhD in statistics as long as you have the right coursework, training, and skills. (Of course, that is the landscape NOW - who knows what it’ll look like in 5-7 years once the field has had a chance to coalesce a bit. Neither PhDs in economics nor PhDs in statistics have many problems finding jobs, though.)
You can easily make $130K+ as a data scientist. The average salary is around $120K+ and there are many, many data scientists running around pulling in $150K+ or even $200K depending on the company and their training. The more computer science/machine learning you know, the higher the salary you can command.
PhDs in the private sector put you in an interesting place overall, but in data science especially, the majority of employers who have the money to invest in paying data scientists $130K+ or more typically prefer PhDs to MS degree holders.
My one request is that whatever PhD you choose to do, you take some behavioral science classes and inject some responsibility into the enterprise. It’s funny because I was talking about this at work today, about the difference between a data scientist and a quantitative social/behavioral scientist with facility in big data (I fall into the latter group). One of the current issues in data science/big data in big tech companies is that a lot of people who understand neither statistics nor behavioral science believe that data is Magic, and that if you can just get the right Mathy Person to massage some numbers that they can solve world hunger. There aren’t a lot of people who are asking good questions about whether we are doing the right analyses with the data that we have, or whether we are answering useful questions to help understand behaviors and social interactions between people (because ultimately, that’s what we want to understand).
Juillet, thank you so much for the response. Just to be clear, the takeaway is that a PhD would lead me on the right path to becoming a data scientist (as long as I choose the correct program), however, my M.S. in applied economics can lead me down the same path?
I will definitely look into some behavioral science classes!
Yes, essentially!