It only seems that way because as a company you're amortizing the investment in education over 2 years, when as an individual the employee can amortize that inv

It only seems that way because as a company you're amortizing the investment in education over 2 years, when as an individual the employee can amortize that investment over the effective life of the technology or how long he thinks the knowledge will benefit him, which should be way, way longer (since he can switch companies and sell himself as a battle-tested expert). So the $5000 premium does include a payoff for investing in education, but the payoff is spread out among many more years. This is a fundamental economic problem in training employees in transferrable skills. It's the reason why companies rarely pay for employees' graduate degrees (even though it can be extremely tax efficient for them to do so), and in the case that they do, they include term requirements (e.g. you have to work for us for 4 years afterwards, otherwise repay a prorated portion).