I think the real issues is a lot of major corporations have done away with their management training programs over the last decade or severely reduced their class sizes.
It used to be companies like GE/Accenture/Investment banks, etc would hire lots of History, PoliSci, Econ majors etc and put them through rigorous in house training programs where they learned the business, became consultants, etc.
Yeah I was just reading an article about this in the WSJ wrt Goldman Sachs severely cutting their analyst training program. I wonder why they thought this was the way to go. I mean, it's obviously less expensive for them to hire econ/finance majors directly into assistant or associate positions so I can see why that would be considered a plus but do they not think that humanities/liberal arts majors are worth training anymore? My (admittedly limited) understanding of the situation was that if you had an appropriate math background, you could pretty much be taught to do a variety of finance jobs through such programs.
It doesn't say anything about preferring business majors over humanities. They're changing the program by not giving contracts or bonuses because the trainees weren't staying with GS after their contracts were up, and sometimes violated their contracts before the term was up. It says they still have the program and even kept the contracts/bonuses for other trainee types.
The Economist says there is a trend of companies, govts and colleges working together to come up with training programs so that may be why some companies are not offering as many of their own courses. I don't have a problem with people getting trained at educational institutions vs employers. It provides greater access to people since you don't have to be hired to be included, and the skills might be even more transferable than a company-specific class. There are still plenty of employer-based programs though so it's not like there is only one way of becoming educated or trained.