Your looking at it from the wrong perspective. Your looking at it from the perspective of the business. I'm sure from their perspective it rocks to have employees spend their own money to help the company. From his perspective however, it's not good when the company takes advantage of what he spent his money on. However in this case I think that he was basically hired because he has those competencies, so they're not taking advantage of anything, presumably the wage he is being paid compensates for the degrees.