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.