As far as doctoral degrees are concerned... if you have to ask, you definitely shouldn't. People who go into it for the prospects, rather than for sheer compulsion and love of the work, typically don't make it through the degree.
The point I made was that the "love of the work" is what drives people to go into industry rather than stay in academia. The amount of resources available, the freedom to explore, and the opportunity to solve problems when you are in your 20s vs 40s is a very powerful draw.
Here is an example. My graduate econ prof had some statistical questions about stocks and a math issue. I looked over what he was doing. He thought it was a lot of data - a few million items, but I work with billions of items every day - and his tools - some c-based shareware and excel were nothing versus a modern RDBMS and analytics. It took me seconds to run his analyses after a day of set up. He'd spent months working on it and it took me one long evening.
The sources, data set, and tools used for data analysis in most sciences are all atrocious by modern standards as compared to business-based data processing. This is just one area where academia is hopeless mired in the past.
