Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.
Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.
Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.
A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.
Aircraft engines are subjected to both.
Some of this seems reverse causal to me. There were many consumers interested in options other than a race to the bottom. I certainly remember 90s Consumer Reports-era consciousness of consumers trying to find the best products as they all seemed to race to the bottom.
The irony seems to be that now that GE has sold GE Appliances they've been returning to higher quality and cutting fewer corners just because activist US shareholders wanted slightly higher dividends each quarter. It feels like only a matter of time before Heier finishes the next steps in the Lenovo playbook and stops paying GE to license their brand and stop giving credit to a US company that stopped caring about consumers and consumer product quality decades ago.
And universities research capabilities are being destroyed too right now.
Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being untrue. Education and training are never wasted money, the skills aren't changing that quickly, there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board. Someone needs to solve the problems you hand-wave away.
> this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid.
That's me. I specialize in learning new domains. I cost like 8x more than the random junior you'd be able to hire with a functional onboarding program.
Labor force participation is ~62%, far lower than historical peaks. I don't buy it.
Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.
Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.
R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.
Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.