Starbucks Offers Workers 2 Years of Free College

mpicpp writes Starbucks baristas working through college are about to get an extra boost from their employer. The company announced it will offer both full and part-time employees a generous tuition reimbursement benefit that covers two full years of classes. The benefit is through a partnership with Arizona State University's online studies program. Employees can choose from any of more than 40 undergraduate degrees, and aren't limited to only business classes.

Comments

No good for anthropologists

[nowsharing]

In the field of anthropology, we typically get our degree first before moving on to Starbucks employment.

BSES

[MobyDisk]

By 2016, the average barista will need at least a 2 year degree to remain competitive. The best ones will have their BSES (Bachelor of science in espresso services)

In civilized countries...

[Stormwatch]

In civilized countries, education is public and fully tax-paid anyway.

Re:In civilized countries...

[wiggles]

See, what happened to those days was that gradually, colleges realized they could keep raising prices past what the government could pay, because they knew families of students could pay more. Colleges built palaces to "education", dormitories with gold plated faucets, gymnasiums, new buildings that were completely unnecessary simply because they could. All the while, tuition kept going up - the government saw that tuition was increasing at universities, so they'd raise the amount of subsidy, then the college would raise tuition above that to the point where families were bled just as much as before. Eventually, the bottom dropped out, the government said enough is enough, and held or dropped subsidies. Colleges, so used to 10% pay raises for tenured professors and unwilling to live with 20 year old dorms, screamed - "they're cutting our funding!" - so they just saddle their students with the maximum loan allowance they can - because they know they can get it - just to keep the gravy train coming. The more the government allows students to borrow, the more money colleges will charge.

It's economics at work. It's called Rent Seeking Behavior. If there is money to be gotten, it will be.

Here's a journal paper someone wrote on it.

Here's a bunch of resources on this from a think tank.

Re:In civilized countries...

[Calavar]

Those are terrible counterexamples, because US investments in Europe, South Korea and Japan easily payed themselves back a thousand fold. The cold war was really a form of modern mercantilism. Whereas 18th century mercantilist empires took raw materials from their dependent nations and sent back manufactured goods, 20th century mercantilists (the US, and to a lesser extent the USSR) built silos abroad and sold arms and bonds to their dependent nations. In return the US got enormous shares of stock in companies like Renault, Dassault, Volkswagen, Daimler, Samsung, and Nippon, sources of cheap manufactured goods, and Iranian oil (Saudi oil after the Shah was overthrown).

We Americans like to pretend that we have the largest economy in the world because our parents and grandparents were harder working, more intelligent, and more creative than foreigners. The reality is that we are on top because we were the only nation to come out of the second world war unscathed (thanks you, Atlantic Ocean), and we used that position to take advantage of everyone else.

Winning wars = winning money. Fighting 13+ year unwinnable wars = losing money, but that is a separate issue.

Re:Nothing to see here

[plopez]

ASU has swimming pools

Serious degrees

[PopeRatzo]

This is good news for all the departments of gender studies and theater programs.