More importantly for a business, you can get a lot more bang for your buck. High School grads have much lower pay expectations.
There are two mechanisms by which we get richer. One is by increasing our income. The other is by reducing the prices of the things we buy with it. The former is how we increase our wealth relative to other members of society. The latter is how the society increases its overall standard of wealth.
On one hand each of us wants to get paid well. On the other, the more we get paid the higher the costs of the business we're in and the less of its fruits the society gets to enjoy overall.
This dilemma is particularly acute if you're lucky to be in a business you genuinely care about (a huge and rare privilege). For example, if you work in space industry, your salary and benefits contribute directly to the costs of space exploration. This means that ultimately the more you earn the less space exploration we can do per buck.
Generally, people's pay is a balancing act that should involve both fairness and efficiency.
Higher ROI is how an investor increases her wealth relative to other members of society. Lower capital gains make the society richer overall.
If you invest your savings in a space business and genuinely care about it, then the return you demand becomes the cost of space exploration. Identical dilemma to that of the worker.
The class warfare between owners of capital and workers is essentially the same mechanics but taken between two specially chosen groups. In general, each individual and each group seeks to increase their share relative to others (whether you call it income or capital gains). Costs going down is how we all get richer as a society (the costs including both paychecks and capital gains).
Doesn't this assume that you the value you create for the company is less than or equal to your salary? Seems like the opposite of reality.
In for-profit businesses, workers should always be a net gain.
Your space exploration analogy would fall apart if you worked for SpaceX, for example. Paying engineers dearly doesn't mean the company makes less money: it means it can get even more lucrative contracts.
So yes, in budget-constrained non-growth organizations like NASA, you might be a net-loss, but that's a pretty special case.
There's a lot of hate on degrees at HN, but I felt like I got a lot out of mine, even if I was bored in of all the intro classes; sure it's not something I couldn't learn by myself, but being employed full time tends to not give you a lot of time to just learn things that aren't necessary to do the job right in front of you.