Historically, the free or cheap student licenses were believed to pay them back when those students moved into industry and were inclined to install what they were familiar with. There's still a lot of MATLAB in college teaching curricula.

Part of when I help on-board newly graduated colleagues (typically engineers and scientists, not hired as programmers) is to reassure them that they can get a MATLAB license if will help them get productive quickly. This has happened once or twice. Many of them never bother, as they get busy enough with CAD and basic design work, that they don't really find a use for scientific computation. But to an increasing extent, they're willing to make the hop to Python, possibly just because it's a popular buzzword, but in any event, they are able to get themselves up to speed pretty quickly.