Starbucks Will Now Pay for its Employees' College Education
You can make fun of Starbucks all you want. You can laugh at the stupid names for its coffees and mock those who enjoy them. But here's something you can't poke holes in: How the company is taking care of its employees. Starbucks just announced that it will help pay for its employees college education. Go ahead and try and laugh at that.
The new program will allow ALL Starbucks' workers (there are about 135,000 of them across the country) to enroll in classes at Arizona State University via the school's online degree program, with no requirement to keep working at Starbucks or pay back the company. As long as the person works 20 hours per week and has the grades to attend ASU, they get at least some of their tuition paid for. For those who have already completed two years of college, Starbucks will pay the last two years in full. For those with fewer than two years, the company will pay for part of the cost.
The move means Starbucks will pay for their employees' education, knowing that one day soon, they'll leave the company for somewhere better paying/more fulfilling. The coffee company is essentially saying "We know you don't want to do this forever, here, we'll help you get away from us." From a business perspective, it's like shooting yourself in the foot.
“Starbucks is going where no other major corporation has gone,” Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation, an education rights group, told The New York Times. “For many of these Starbucks employees, an online university education is the only reasonable way they’re going to get a bachelor’s degree.”
That, according to Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz, is the primary goal. No strings attached. "In the last few years, we have seen the fracturing of the American dream," Schultz said in a statement. "There’s no doubt, the inequality within the country has created a situation where many Americans are being left behind. The question for all of us is, should we accept that, or should we try and do something about it."
You can go ahead and label Starbucks as a company that is doing something about it. Something major. This is a truly game changing move, in that it's an active one. It's not empty words and ambiguous promises. It's putting real money into the hands of people who want an education. There's something amazing about that.
[Image via Flickr - Marco Paköeningrat]
