[ForHackernews]

> At what point does it make sense for Google-likes to educate their own workforce, skipping the university model entirely?

Never. You may be too young to remember this, but it used to be very common for companies to hire employees and then train them to do the jobs the company needed done.

Eventually, companies realized that it was much more cost-effective to foist off the expense of training onto employees themselves (and, indirectly onto taxpayers through federal financial aid) so it's become rare for companies to have any kind of formal training program. They expect potential employees to go heavily into debt training themselves, and then hope to find somebody who is already trained for their exact job role.

Google is no different from other companies in this regard: Training people is expensive, and if they can avoid that expense, they will avoid it.