<p>How common is this practice? Is it limited to/concentrated in certain fields of study/work? If so, which ones? Would public health be one?</p>
<p>This practice is seen more commonly abroad or in business settings. Public health is probably one that an employer would pay for if you’re doing clinical trials or something like that. If you think that you can just approach your employer about this because they have something in their employee handbook about tuition reimbursement, you may be in for a disappointment. The right question to ask is if any other employees have been able to take advantage of that perk. Often employers will only pay a small portion of tuition or reduce your salary substantially or force you to use up all of your vacation and sick time for this. I was lucky enough to work at a company that did all three of these things.</p>
<p>Some employers will only pay for graduate school if it enhances your current job or if the degree you seek will allow you to fill some other job description in the company.</p>
<p>I’ve seen two setups for this.</p>
<p>One is that your employer pays you to go to grad school full-time, in exchange for you agreeing to work for them for a certain number of years after you get your degree. This one doesn’t seem too common, and it seems to be mostly large companies do it.</p>
<p>The other is that your employer pays some or all of your tuition as you go to school part or full-time, in a field relevant to what they do, while working for them full-time. This is what I’m doing. In computer science it is very common - not sure about other fields. We’re an AI company, and in addition to the occasional computer science grad student, we also had a guy get his master’s in psych with company funding, since it was relevant to his work.</p>