CEO vs worker pay

In our Intro to Management "Drucker Day," we discussed articles about Peter Drucker heralding him as the "Father of Modern Management" (Byrne, 2009), imagining what Peter Drucker would say today (Kantor, 2009), and why we should still pay attention to his management lessons (Kantrow, 2009, 1980). One of the trends that particularly troubled Drucker was the increasing misalignment of CEO pay with the pay of regular workers, which he thought was morally wrong. We did an experiment in class today. I asked management students to (1) name a company they would like to work for, (2) how much they would want to be paid for being the CEO, and (3) how much they would want to be paid for simply working there. The results?
In a class of 44 management students, the average ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 73, and the median ratio was 20. A typical student expects to make $1 million for being the CEO, but is perfectly happy to accept a salary of $55,000. When Drucker raised his concerns about pay disparities 20 years ago, the ratio was 40. Just prior to the meltdown of 2008, the ratio was 400, which also happens to be the maximum ratio reported by any student in our class. Do novice management students lack a sense of the magnitude of CEO salaries today, or are their estimates a more accurate reflection of what CEO salaries should be? The mode salary of $500,000 suggests the former is explanation.
Post Script: See Flowingmotion's comments below. They offer some compelling questions about how HR recruiters fail to justify this gap. We need empirical tests.