No that will not happen as the company has to pay and it shows in their accounts.

Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training.

See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this.

I've heard this argument over decades and to this day it doesn't make any sense to me. You know what happens when you do that ivory tower thing? Those professions die.

I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.

To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.

Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.

You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.

Maybe AI will be yet another disincentivized for higher education. When I was considering law school a decade ago, the overwhelming advices from existing attorneys was “unless you’re in the top 10% of the top 10% of universities, you’re wasting your time getting a law degree”. Seems very similar to university today (at least in the USA)

it is too challenging today to capture the value of training your early employees, labor markets too liquid

> With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.

They'll probably just shut it all down.

With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway.

On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.