pipobscureBlog ·
They might be leaving for better paying jibs, but you can bet your rear end, they will get their coffee from Starbucks for the rest of their lives. I think this is a smart way to grow your own customers. Hire people with potential, educate them to make more money elsewhere, take their money when they become the most loyal customers possible. Oh and they’ll be able to afford your product, because they won’t have student loans to pay off.
Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on Monday.
The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 United States employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the cost, but even for many of them, courses will be free, with government and university aid.
“Starbucks is going where no other major corporation has gone,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, a group focused on education. “For many of these Starbucks employees, an online university education is the only reasonable way they’re going to get a bachelor’s degree.”
Starbucks is, in effect, inviting its workers, from the day they join the company, to study whatever they like, and then leave whenever they like — knowing that many of them, degrees in hand, will leave for better-paying jobs.
NYTimes: Starbucks to offer free college education to employees
More of this, corporate America.
They might be leaving for better paying jibs, but you can bet your rear end, they will get their coffee from Starbucks for the rest of their lives. I think this is a smart way to grow your own customers. Hire people with potential, educate them to make more money elsewhere, take their money when they become the most loyal customers possible. Oh and they’ll be able to afford your product, because they won’t have student loans to pay off.