> Bell Labs’ One Year On Campus program, in which they paid new-grad employees to earn a master’s degree on the topic of Bell’s choosing
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?
One common theme is that companies used to treat good employees as assets. Now they treat all employees as liabilities.
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.
But even if companies decided to see how much abuse employees would take, that doesn't explain this. The point of the master's program wasn't to reward the employee; it was to make the employee more valuable for the company.
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?
The answer to your question seems straight-forward: they still do.
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!
> I'd be surprised if the Bells lab offer didn't have similar clawbacks.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
I don't think companies pay for you to go do an MS or a PhD full-time on company dime. At that time AT&T was a monopoly and may have had money to burn on this. There also may not have been expectations of hyper-growth from the stock market that exist today.
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.
In general, nobody needs to pay someone to do a PhD, at least in a scientific or engineering field -- even in the US, the country where education generally costs the most -- typically PhD students get free tuition as well as a living stipend. Masters students, granted typically don't get this benefit -- but in the US that's typically a terminal degree -- unlike in many countries you don't do a Masters and then a PhD -- you do one or the other.
>The company I work pays normal salaries for their PhD students.
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.
This is still very common in Germany. Many companies, especially large ones, offer Master/bachelor thesis, which are supervised by a professor at an university, but the student is employed full time for the duration of the thesis.
Bell Labs is best known for inventing things like the solar cell and transistor, but that's a small part of their work. Bell Labs had a whole applied division dedicated to phone company science. This article digs into the details of what it was like to work at Bell Labs, but not the Bell Labs.
The Bell System was, in modern parlance, fully vertically integrated. They didn't own the mines that the copper for the conductors was extracted from. And they didn't cast the copper ingots. Though they were interested in the metallurgy. Because they drew their own wire. And cables. And transformers. And vacuum tubes. And so on. It was all in-house. They even treated their own telephone poles. So something like a practical survey of various types of preservative treatments for wood was in the remit of Bell Labs just like the physics of a vacuum tube. Almost everything in science was in the remit when they had such a broad mandate. The Bell System had elements that almost resembled a kind of state within a state. (Part of why it was killed off -- antitrust violations.)
1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when speaking to customers on site."
2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to customers on Zoom."
This honestly does not sound boring in the least. Statistical design of experiments is super interesting. You can tune your experiments to get the most useful information within your experimental budget. If you’ve ever run a physical real world experiment, you’ll understand how much time and expense is involved in doing it at a plant level. The ability to be economical here is so important!
I agree! Science is about experiments to verify hypotheses. Design of Experiments seems like a fundamental part of that. That's also why the quote below made me laugh.
> What if you don’t care about efficiency or causality?
"Yeah, what about if you don't care about money/time and are happy with finding a correlation only?!!?"
Totally agree! DOE is way underrated. Once you’ve had to run real experiments (especially at scale), you really appreciate how much time and money a good experimental design can save. It’s one of those areas where a bit of math makes a huge practical difference.
She has some heritige there. If your near ancestors are academic it much be such a lift in terms of advice and connections. Espepecially ex Bell labs and the TV patent.
> Bell Labs’ One Year On Campus program, in which they paid new-grad employees to earn a master’s degree on the topic of Bell’s choosing
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?
One common theme is that companies used to treat good employees as assets. Now they treat all employees as liabilities.
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.
But even if companies decided to see how much abuse employees would take, that doesn't explain this. The point of the master's program wasn't to reward the employee; it was to make the employee more valuable for the company.
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?
The answer to your question seems straight-forward: they still do.
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!
> I'd be surprised if the Bells lab offer didn't have similar clawbacks.
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.
>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?
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.
No way...
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.
I don't think companies pay for you to go do an MS or a PhD full-time on company dime. At that time AT&T was a monopoly and may have had money to burn on this. There also may not have been expectations of hyper-growth from the stock market that exist today.
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.
In general, nobody needs to pay someone to do a PhD, at least in a scientific or engineering field -- even in the US, the country where education generally costs the most -- typically PhD students get free tuition as well as a living stipend. Masters students, granted typically don't get this benefit -- but in the US that's typically a terminal degree -- unlike in many countries you don't do a Masters and then a PhD -- you do one or the other.
The company I work pays normal salaries for their PhD students.
That pretty much standard in Germany in industrial research departments.
>The company I work pays normal salaries for their PhD students.
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.
This is very common in Europe. PhDs are sponsored by a given company
This is still very common in Germany. Many companies, especially large ones, offer Master/bachelor thesis, which are supervised by a professor at an university, but the student is employed full time for the duration of the thesis.
Bell Labs is best known for inventing things like the solar cell and transistor, but that's a small part of their work. Bell Labs had a whole applied division dedicated to phone company science. This article digs into the details of what it was like to work at Bell Labs, but not the Bell Labs.
The Bell System was, in modern parlance, fully vertically integrated. They didn't own the mines that the copper for the conductors was extracted from. And they didn't cast the copper ingots. Though they were interested in the metallurgy. Because they drew their own wire. And cables. And transformers. And vacuum tubes. And so on. It was all in-house. They even treated their own telephone poles. So something like a practical survey of various types of preservative treatments for wood was in the remit of Bell Labs just like the physics of a vacuum tube. Almost everything in science was in the remit when they had such a broad mandate. The Bell System had elements that almost resembled a kind of state within a state. (Part of why it was killed off -- antitrust violations.)
"the" Bell Labs was effectively gone by the 1970's anyway. So the Bell Labs described in this article was "the" Bell Labs
That didnt stop the flow of Nobels
For work done after 1970 - optical tweezers,laser cooling, quantum hall, superres microscopy, quantum dots (NP 2023)
Not to forget Shor and Grover (1990s!)
Holmdel had the antenna of Penzias/Wilson
For me, this marked the end of Bell Labs (Murray Hill):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Beginning_o...
Not sure what the bottleneck was: https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2025/11/19/science-...
1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when speaking to customers on site."
2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to customers on Zoom."
This honestly does not sound boring in the least. Statistical design of experiments is super interesting. You can tune your experiments to get the most useful information within your experimental budget. If you’ve ever run a physical real world experiment, you’ll understand how much time and expense is involved in doing it at a plant level. The ability to be economical here is so important!
I agree! Science is about experiments to verify hypotheses. Design of Experiments seems like a fundamental part of that. That's also why the quote below made me laugh.
> What if you don’t care about efficiency or causality?
"Yeah, what about if you don't care about money/time and are happy with finding a correlation only?!!?"
Totally agree! DOE is way underrated. Once you’ve had to run real experiments (especially at scale), you really appreciate how much time and money a good experimental design can save. It’s one of those areas where a bit of math makes a huge practical difference.
She has some heritige there. If your near ancestors are academic it much be such a lift in terms of advice and connections. Espepecially ex Bell labs and the TV patent.