[tankerslay]

>how someone like me who only has a BS in Physics and Electrical Engineering manages to make 1.5x-4.0x what they make my first job out of college, then there is something seriously wrong with the system.

This is largely what I would expect. A PhD (actually, anything after the Master's) isn't really about acquiring new technical skills. It's about learning to put into practice the basic values that sustain the discipline, which in science consist largely of 1) a fanatical obsession with figuring out what the data is really telling you, 2) relentlessly questioning your hypotheses and entertaining alternative explanations, and 3) rooting out the various cognitive nooks and crannies wherein lie the temptations to fool yourself or others.

For most technical jobs, these kinds of habits are not really germane to what you are being asked to do. Hence many businesses are quite reluctant to hire people with PhDs at all. The ones they do pick up will tend to agree that their PhD was a "waste of time."