NZHW,
Your company can choose whoever they like, but anyone eligible who has not taken advantage of the student loan is financially incompetent. If you have 80k saved, you would be significantly better off to put that in a high interest account and do the training interest free. To do otherwise is throwing (possibly tens of) thousands of dollars down the drain!!
AFAIK there are compulsory exit points for not achieving certain mile stones as of a few years back. Not going solo by 20hrs and failing exams a certain number of times.
Perhaps when a student does fail in this way the school needs to lose their funding for that place on the course. Once again I've been out of the loop for a few years now but when I was involved I'm sure the school still had access to the remaining portion of the funds (not that particular student's funds, but the equivalent full time student position could be allocated to another student). Changing that ought to make the schools a little more choosy about who they enrol.
And last but certainly not least, I absolutely agree with those saying the nationwide places need to reflect the number of pilots needed in the industry. This needs to be audited and adjusted every year by someone without a conflict of interest.