As a DoD employee....you are incredibly wrong. The DoD paid for my undergrad, then paid me a full salary to get a masters, and they do the same for a PhD. This is a very common thing for them to do.
You: Wrong! The DoD actually outsources training to PhD programs.
And this is why you are so confident in your claim that you made a new account a few minutes ago to argue with people?
How long have you been on HN using your real account, if I may ask?
Or perhaps you'd like to claim that you randomly stumbled into this board a few minutes ago and happened to see this thread and decided to post with your relevant expertise.
First you have to overcome the moral barrier problem to get people to work there these days (resulting in higher conditions for those who do)
Then you have the fact that its products are not easily measurable in terms of consumer utility or organisational profit/ utility, and its own budget/demand side is not based directly on consumer choice, competition or revenue.
DoD has a specific unique position in most of our cultures and market, and its conditions cannot and should not be extrapolated to other parts of economic life/debate unless you can also bring those other aspects of defense which make its particular environment possible (Which is generally neither possible nor desirable).
In short, being able to sleep at night is a form of non-cash benefit, and the fact that everyone wants to do it increases the supply of labor for those jobs.
contentious or morally repugnant jobs are just the opposite, shrinking the available labor pool and inducing an intangible cost on normal people who take them on. Of course, if you're a psychopath or morally blind, you as an individual do not pay this psychological cost, and benefit from the increased wages and conditions deriving from the relative shortage of labor.
There's a reason they call it the dismal science... :p
DoD is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.
Some Silicon Valley companies will pay for your master's degree, but usually you still have to work full time for the company in addition to your course work.
I've heard of some companies like Pixar actively training their employees for several months and paying them to learn (rather than expecting them to keep working full time in addition to training) but that seems unusual.
Why is this a bad thing - I'm genuinely curious? I completed a masters and a PhD the same way. Of course, the downside is that since I already had a job I wasn't going to deal with the funding rat-race that comes with academia and stayed in industry.
Edit: The biggest upside - career growth, no student loans, regular paycheck, health insurance, etc, etc.
First of all I admire you for finishing a Master's and PhD while working.
I personally think about going back to school all the time (I didn't finish undergrad) but am pretty confident that if I do I would want to go full time.
My reason is just that working full time is exhausting and I can't imagine being able to give 100% to my studies if I'm also constantly fatigued from work.
I certainly still am able to learn new things after working, but compared to when I was focused on school completely I learn at a much slower pace. There's a lot of cognitive overhead in having to context switch, at least for me personally.