>I agree in general.
>The deception is even more egregious when you consider the number of people who go deeply into debt to go to college and never finish (about 40%)

There's also the forgotten factor of unemployment time between graduation and that salary. The salary which gets into the average is only the paid one; the missed ones are absent from the calculation.

>As I said before, though, the quality of the individual is more important than the degree or lack of it.

And the same should apply to HR managers, i.e. they should be looking at the candidates through such glasses. But no - there are many of those who only try to reduce the time spent on reading CVs, to the point that they read only the first paragraph or even filter out, without reading, those not containing a certain set of TLAs.