I don't really buy that. I know several great programmers who are now great sysadmins, or vice versa.
Now, sysadmin may be a bit of a misnomer - sometimes sysadmins are given fancy titles such as 'network engineer', 'network architect', 'IT Manager', etc. They're all basically sysadmins.
Good sysadmins do more than just image laptops. They are familiar with the software's architecture, so they can help scale it up to whatever proportions are needed. They almost certaintly are proficient perl/bash/python programmers as well.
Education is not going to pay for top-class engineering talent. They pretty much have to go for the lowest common denominator (Exchange, MCSE's are ten a penny) or outsource altogether.
In my experience, there are several kinds of sysadmins.
Many of them are little more than low-skilled button pressers, password resetters, and service restarters (although they may have lots of domain-specific knowledge learned by rote and not understood).
The good ones, however, are more than competent programmers in their own right, can make quick and accurate diagnoses of tough problems and fix them, write their own tools, etc.
