I suppose the title of this should be "grad school doesn't make you money". You can make excellent cases for and against this, especially for the IT crowd. As a high school dropout, I certainly had no issues with making money in the tech sector. Going to collage expressly to increase my market value would be a silly idea. That's not why I went back to school. I went seeking a new challenge, and found that I could do…
"A cost/benefit analysis on grad school can never be representative, because the experiences, skills, and research can't be quantified. You might become interested in a new field, create an operating system (see Linus Torvalds' masters thesis), or meet your future wife." Right. And if you join the Navy, you might get to see the world, and you might marry a beautiful Polynesian girl! You don't do these sorts of things…
Plenty of (stupid) people join _ because they like the look of the uniform.
From the hacker side of things I don't think most people joined the NSA because of the salary and benefits. Doing a cost benefit analysis and ignoring the small things is missing the point.