Why then the school price/salary correlation ? Surely a candidate will seize the unique opportunity of learning vast amounts of useful stuff in his future career, as opposed to say, skimming along a cheap PhD ?
I honestly didn't see the school price/salary correlation anywhere but in the summary, but I didn't delve deeply into Georgetown's actual report. I'd be happy to have a look if you'd like to point it out to me. One might reasonably expect an ivy league "business" major to do considerably better than a heavy drinking state school fratboy "business" major.
Regarding learning "useful stuff" during a career, allow me to use anecdotal evidence. The statistical evidence seems to be entirely in my favor (that high education leads to higher pay) which seems to be distasteful to a number of /.'ers with mod points to spare on me, so I think anecdotes might be appropriate.
Take my friends that ended their engineering education at a BS. They generally got around $50-$60k starting pay, scattered around the country, with benefits one expects in professional jobs. Over the past 4 years, the vast majority of them have been doing fairly mundane tasks. Lots of them simply sitting in front of CAD programs doing repetitive, technical tasks. I'd agree, that many of these skills they could've learned in trade school. A much smaller handful of more talented, more motivated friends are moving up their company ladders, and doing correspondingly more interesting work for more pay, but they're naturally the exception in the pyramid of a corporation. Thing is, these entry-level people aren't learning a whole bunch of interesting, varied things. They're paid a salary to do one job, not learn to do others.
Now, take those who did an MS after their BS. They spent two years getting a much more broad yet in-depth education. They learned far more in two years than those who went straight to industry, no matter how passionate they were. A for-profit industry can never provide the kind of variety that academia can. In the words of a government researcher PhD friend, "it's the industry's job to train, and academia's job to educate." Those MS people were able to take much more interesting, challenging, better paying jobs that gave them more fulfillment, and it's based entirely on the considerable technical skills they acquired.
And then, the PhD is a different ballgame altogether. Suggesting that you can accumulate the kind of technical knowledge learned in an engineering/science PhD program by "skimming over the course of a career" is quite simply wrong and naive. There's a damn good reason why fresh PhD grads are hired for technical research positions at major companies for twice the pay, and not some 50 year old hobbyist.