It may not be practical to hire those folks for your run-of-the-mill analytics consulting work, but of course they are the best in the field. You wouldn’t hire a structural engineer who specializes in designing skyscrapers to design a one-story masonry building, but there’s no doubt he/she could do it.

I’m not being insulting here, just telling it like it is. Consulting firms tend to hire people fresh out of school that they can train for a particular role. I work at a failure analysis firm which hires mostly post-docs from a few top engineering schools, and a lot of them think the same way I once did, because that’s the culture. It’s a whole lot easier to find a fault in a system than to design it in the first place, and I had a couple of my analyses torn apart by more experienced opposing experts before I learned that lesson: we aren’t the best of the best, academic credentials only take you so far. Respect these people and learn from them and it will make you a better consultant.