I agree and am against non competes, but feel weird about how that would be replaced. Obvious thought is to put a monitary value of the training and let that value "vest" over a year or two, so if the employee leaves early they have to pay back everything. That sounds good, but then you'll have situations where some company is just inflating the true costs of their training in order to make an employee stick around because they don't want to be on the hook for $X0,000. It would end up being like a reverse signing bonus.

So I have no clue what the solution is, all alternatives seem to be negative.