College tuition is such a complicated issue, further complicated by the growing uselessness of the college degree.
Consider how many people are majoring in shit that doesn't make them more marketable, vs STEM and things more directly applicable to their desired field.
I think a lot of the "college graduate" bitching about how employers aren't kicking in their doors is coming from people with BAs in psych, history, communication, etc..
I don't know how it is in the rest of the country, but in Oklahoma nobody seems to care about education when it comes to IT. Certifications still matter, but you don't need to go to college to get a cert.
1) I'd be surprised if it had no impact on salary.
2) I can't speak for the nation at large, but the local CSU's program for Information Systems (Management of Information Systems elsewhere) is largely a business degree with a minor in some slightly technical classes. In other words, it's worthless, and doesn't work towards preparing one for the job. Computer Science, on the other hand, has some somewhat meaty classes on the subject, but not many, and it's encased in a ton of rather unrelated curriculum, most dissuasive of which is basically the same fucking death-march of mathematics prerequisites given to budding scientists.