The college premium exists in part because so many types of raw data are getting dramatically cheaper, and as data get cheaper, the bottleneck increasingly is the ability to interpret and use data. This reflects the career advice that Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently gives: seek to be an indispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful. Examples include data scientists, writers of mobile phone apps, and genetic counselors, who have come into demand as more people have their genes sequenced.
