I wonder why companies don’t do this anymore. Is it something to do with the monopoly AT&T held, is it related to corporate tax structures, is it related to how easy it is to find PhD graduates who studied similar topics of interest, or is it something else entirely?
What changed? A lot. The underlying theme across all companies, to both employees and customers, has been "see how much abuse they'll take before they leave", which sadly has had marvelous results because the answer is... a lot. Notice that at least half of the largest companies by market cap have no actual support at all.
Add in that tuition has exploded, it became cheaper and quicker just to import people than to train them.
I think the issue is that companies no longer trust their ability to retain their more valuable employees. Why pay to make the employee more valuable for someone else?
That's probably a direct consequence of the (Milton) Friedman doctrine taking hold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine), which has made capitalism much less friendly to customers and employees in order maximize shareholder rewards.
For customers and employees, this kind of capitalism "optimizes" your situation until it's as bad as you can take without quitting. If you're genuinely happy, that's a glitch that's in the process of being worked out.
1. Companies have tuition reimbursement for general employees, but it's usually nominal at $5k/year and part-time education is implied.
2. Executive MBAs and more selective executive seminars are covered by companies so the focus will be better. These aren't cheap (easily $125k/year) and might come with early exit penalties. I'd be surprised if the Bells lab offer didn't have similar clawbacks.
3. Tuition in 1970 isn't what it is now! Wayyyy cheaper!
Bellcore inherited the year on campus program from Bell Labs. There were no clawbacks and no requirement to even return to work for Bellcore after graduation.
As you say, executive MBA programs are costly and the assumption is almost certainly that a company is paying for it for select senior people being groomed for executive roles. They're often full-time but of relatively limited duration.
Companies do a lot less to retain employees - fewer pensions, fewer accrued benefits and perks - so it's much less attractive to train when you are assuming attrition instead.
Even guys get parental leave, now!
I know too many people that've gotten fancy EMBAs paid for by the company as retention/networking tools along with the countless others (read: majority) that don't use the annual tuition reimbursement available to all employees.
- Employee training and retention. Employers would rather aggressively churn the cheapest employees they can get, rather than cultivating experienced employees.
- Just-in-time inventory. Businesses want to have as little inventory as possible, which means any supply chain disruption causes ripples down the line.
- Advertising. Everything is stuffed full of ads now, including your smart appliances.
The reason companies get away with this is that all big companies have more or less colluded to behave the same way. The managerial class has said "we can have terrible customer service because _everyone_ has terrible customer service". Your product can be full of ads and break every 3 years because _every_ product is like that.
You might ask "why doesn't one competitor break the pattern and do a good job to gain market share?". The answer is that they do, and then they get bigger and more financialized. The capital required to do a good job requires them to take investment, and once the growth narrative has ended they're pressured to squeeze profits out of their customers.
AT&T still pays for various MS courses (mostly MSCS, MS data science and cybersecurity) you can do on a part-time basis. It's quite easy to get the tuition reimbursement for it.
Because we're not in the gargantuan post-WW2 economic boom combined with the electronics-ization / mainframe computerization tech boom anymore. It's easy to treat employees generously when revenue growth just keeps happening almost on its own.
And STEM degrees or even possessing any undergraduate degree was much less common than they are today. The article says "Over 130 people signed up for the One Year On Campus program in 1970.", which is a pittance in a corporation with over a million employees at its peak. Unsurprisingly, people who specialties make them more difficult to replace get treated more favorably.
That pretty much standard in Germany in industrial research departments.
Which is uncommon. BMW used to list their salaries for PhD students, which were fixed at 36.000 a year, which are wages you would expect for working at a grocery store.