The high price of SAS does a good job at constraining the supply of SAS programmers. This has the effect of keeping their salaries at a higher level than a "free" market would. In the short run, this is great for SAS and its user community, but in the long run the likes of Datacamp and R will grind SAS down. SAS is in the same position that the music industry was in 10 years ago. It will follow the music industry's revenue and profitability trajectory. Downward.

I invested 4 months and a few thousand dollars in a SAS certificate program at NYU a couple of years ago. Great program, but when it ended, with my access to SAS cut off, it became impossible for me to develop or even maintain my skills. Graham's suggestion that SAS offer a web-based version for datasets < 10k rows is a good one. I would have been happy with even 2K rows, but now I’m moving on to R.