If they knew the terms of the deal, knew the cost of their training, and agreed, it is exactly like if you joined college and changed your major in my eyes. You don’t get off the hook for those bills because you changed your mind, and you knew what you were getting into.

Changing a major doesn't occur financial penalties, and colleges also allow you to take extremely extended leaves (3+ months, aka a semester/quarter) for emergencies as a normal point of cause and your education credits don't expire for several years (I think a decade?) so if an emergency happens you can step away and return even years later with fairly minimal penalty academically. Credits aren't even charged if you quit early enough IIRC.

If you took out a loan to pay tuition, the loans don't disappear. Isn't this basically the same thing? The employer is loaning you the money to cover training with loan forgiveness for time worked.

No, because the employer isn't loaning you money. In fact it would make much more sense if the employer gave the employee money as a lump sum in exchange for some agreement, much like a relocation or signing bonus. Instead this is the employer pretending its training is worth real money on the real market. In the Reuters article, an esthecian was charged nearly 2k for leaving a shitty job because of "training", despite already independently having the license necessary to do the job and no one reasonably paying that beauty parlor 2k to be educated.

Additionally, certain education-related loans do in fact disappear! Loan forgiveness is a real thing.

Schools are highly regulated. Loans are highly regulated. Education from colleges is accredited and held accountable to third party institutions. Employers training you then charging you isn't regulated at all. It's ripe for abuse and clearly abuse is taking place to the woman in the article.

It's a little more complicated than that. It could be that the place is offering training as a carrot and overpricing it as a means of suppressing pay to their employees.

So you get a junior developer for half the cost for whatever the length of the payback period is OR you get the cost of a couple of junior developers paid to you by that person.

Not to mention, you could only learn that they're severely underpaying you once you get into the industry.

And when you absolutely need a job, you'll get desperate enough to take some bad deals. Because the alternative is destitution.

1. People who are desperate do what needs to be done. Unlike corporations, humans feel pain.

2. People aren’t perfect. Does everyone know what they’re getting into? Do they know beforehand what kind of salary they’ll get from the company before training? Do they also know how competitive that salary is? Or how good the company is? Maybe it’s the most toxic company ever but is able to hide its negative footprints online.

Why does the reason matter? If you invest in your employee, you want to see something back.

It's not cool to take free training if you know you will be out shortly.

The reason people go out can be anything, could be something silly like moving house.

"just be a better company" sounds like people live in a fantasy world

It sounds like your last line is saying corporations are too corrupt and broken to be as good as human beings?

It’s not cool to force training on someone and then force them to stay or pay it back either. Why does the corporation get off the hook?

My point is, corporations can be just as corrupt as the employees and vice versa. Also, you can have a perfect working place, but people will still leave your company. It would suck if people would leave after you've invested in them and I understand companies want some sort of insurance.

It does suck. Companies should buy an insurance plan from a company that sells insurance if they want insurance. If the company is good at keeping trainees then that'll reflect in their premiums. If they're bad, they should figure out why they're bad.

I find it hard to imagine people being more corrupt than corporations the vast majority of the time. Especially pilots vs corporations. The insane power imbalance and the capitalist society we live in makes it highly unlikely individual middle class people are close to as corrupt as corps.

Also, the companies should get some sort of insurance. Not screw over individual powerless people.

If a company is willing to pay to train an employee, but not willing to pay a higher salary to retain that [now more valuable] employee, that's a decision totally on the company. It seems silly for a company to invest the large initial cost and then fail to pay the ongoing costs.

> It's not cool to take free training if you know you will be out shortly.

It's also not cool to hire people when you know layoffs are coming, but employers do this all the time. But, as you say "just be a better company" is fantasy world belief.

My ex- had this, applied for a job. "We want someone who is going to be here for the long haul, five years plus." She had aspirations for vet school in the next year or two.

To you, that's a commitment from an employee that is fair to expect.

"Is the company committed to giving me a job for the next five years?" ... well, why not?

You're very much in the mindset of "an employee should be happy to have a job".