Formalized System Administration Education

It is interesting to read about more formal approaches to system administrator education. I have been reading “Master Education Programmes in Network and System Administration” from the LISA 07 proceedings. The authors’ approach is an interesting one, but I wonder what we do for all of the administrators already “in the wild”? A training vs. education mentality and the difficulty of adult education make introduction of a program like this very difficult.

The program also seems to be self-selecting. How can we set the standard so these types of skills will become more mainstream instead of a small number capable of formal analysis?  Are employers going to see the value in this becoming mainstream and be willing to pay for the advanced level system administrators?