My experience as I move across industries has been that the only "must-have" that is often non-negotiable is a degree, and that has been because at some point in the past someone in the organization's HR has said "everyone above pay grade 123 must have a degree" (of course usually they don't care about a "relevant" degree, and you have Vice Presidents and DBA's with basket-weaving degrees just to check the box off on the application).

Another relevant side discussion is the fact that their is no degree directly aimed at turning you into a DBA - if you want to be a coder, get a CS degree; if you want to be a DBA (or a server admin), get some degree you like so you can check off the box. Business and MIS degrees are useful, but they still aren't "DBA degrees" like CS is for coders or engineering is for engineers.

I find as I have moved from Education to Market Research to Banking/Finance to Healthcare that the industry specific piece of the job is very quickly picked up - as the original editorial says, the much larger (and more important) part is the technical specifics that any DBA worth their salt can dive into w/o knowing anything about the industry...along the lines of: "I don't care what this database does, but I can tell you're missing the key indexes on these three tables that would actually allow these poorly written stored procedures to work."