Companies have not very often sponsored college students in America, except for some profession like rural doctors where it's local government choosing to help pay for an exceptional debt load for an unpopular lifestyle choice (being primary care physician for a large geographical area).
The other option off the top of my head for Americans is to join one of the military services to fund education.
How did you find the apprenticeship and how did you decide to choose that route? Not sure of much like that in America except some of the construction trades like electricians/plumbers.
For me, after college I was searching for that specific thing. That was my own requirement, I wanted to dev full time while getting a diploma as a "safeguard" and "to look good on my resume".
Actually school is more a side effect of me working. I continued school because it was possible to work same time, if not I guess I would have stopped after college diploma (BAC in France).
Your sentence "if not I guess I would have stopped after college diploma (BAC in France)" does not mean what you think it means. You meant (I believe, correct me if i'm wrong) that you would have stopped after high school (i.e. when passing the final "baccalaureate" exam).
PS: note however that the baccalaureate diploma is in fact (this is a little-known fact, even in France) a University degree in France. it's the first univ degree that exists in the French education system, it sanctions the end of high school. Weird, I know.
It doesn't make any sense for any company to pay to train an employee if it can be avoided. The problem though is that when companies don't directly guide the training you get people who are trained... to do the wrong thing. This leads to the perverse situation where American workers are actually over-educated (lots of fancy college degrees, certifications, etc) but still lack the necessary skills.
Overall the American system is obscenely inefficient, what with people buying $100K lottery tickets in the hope of landing a decent middle class job, but it's also very hard to disrupt because virtually all of the risk and downside is borne by less fortunate Americans whose lives don't matter anyways. For everybody else -- corporations, investors, and the government -- the system works great. It's a classic serfdom strategy where during good times the nobility takes takes a big cut and during bad times the nobility takes a big cut. Unfortunately, unlike serfs, these terminally indebted Americans don't kill themselves or run away and so there is a kind of macro-inefficiency that builds up slowly overtime.
There may be an opportunity for individual companies to take a risk and train up employees but this is a very risky strategy and it isn't necessarily a good thing for workers. It can work only if you pay these untrained employees very little money and this is the other side of the hammer, wage suppression of highly indebted workers. The more you can trap young workers with enormous debt loads the less you actually need to pay them so even companies that "take a chance" on workers can still force the worker to bear most of the risk.
Apprenticeship can work in other engineering fields (at least it does in Germany, for cultural reasons), perhaps a few other fields like sales... but you cannot extrapolate for all educational tracks
Same with other path to software engineers like self-taught or bootcamps. Very good but almost impossible to replicate in other fields with less desperate demand
Bootcamps are a decent alternative to a college tech degree. Instead of taking out $40k+ in loans, you can escape your poorly paid job by dropping $10k-$20k of your own (or your parents') money. It's usually worth it if you have the means, since your salary will probably double and you'll recoup the cost within a year.
Bootcamp students are basically useless when they graduate, but they can open an editor, write unit tests for dog.speak() and use git. The senior devs on the team they join end up training them. So it becomes like an apprenticeship system where the prospective apprentice shows serious interest by supplying a "modest" payment.
Yes, Europe has better/cheaper education, but many smart people get educated here and then get hired by USA companies, or even leave for USA. Unfortunately, money rules...
It was not prestigious school, nor prestigious diploma, I could have continued for a master, but IMO, I value experience far more than diploma, and where I worked/work also.
So my question is Americans? What's the deal. Same for France too, I guess our profession as developers allow that, I can understand that for some other fields you need prestigious schools and requirements to get hired for a good salary.