Starbucks to pay tuition for employees to graduate

Starbucks, which already offers generous retirement benefits in addition to company stock to its US employees, would be adding yet another uncommon perk in the service industry: last two years of college, on the house, with no strings attached, The Seattle Times reported.

The Seattle coffee giant would reimburse full tuition for employees who enrolled as juniors and seniors at Arizona State University's online programme.

The company added, freshmen and sophomores  would be eligible for a partial scholarship and need-based financial aid. under its Starbucks College Achievement Plan.

The Starbucks College Achievement Plan would be offered to employees who worked at a company-operated store for an average of over 20 hours a week, which, according to Starbucks  covered the vast majority of its 135,000 US staffers, including staffers at Teavana, La Boulange, Evolution Fresh and Seattle's Best Coffee stores.

Once in the programme, employees could choose from 40 majors. Interestingly, employees do not need to commit to stay with Starbucks after they graduated.

Declining to specify how much the programme would cost, the company said it was too early to know how many people would enroll.

Even as the company and the university did not specify the cost of tuition for the programme, according to the Arizona State University website, tuition for its undergraduate online programmes ranged from $480 to $543 per credit hour.

For baristas, as Starbucks employees are referred to, with at least two years of college credit, the company would pay full tuition; while those with fewer credits would need to pay part of the cost, however, for many of them, courses would be free, with government and university aid.

Dallas News quoted Jamie P Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, a group focused on education as saying Starbucks was going where no other major corporation had gone.

He added, for many of these Starbucks employees, an online university education was the only reasonable way to get a bachelor's degree.

Though many employers offered tuition reimbursement, those programmes usually came with limitations like only partial reimbursements for the study or new employees being excluded, requiring that workers stayed for years afterward, or limiting reimbursement to work-related courses.

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, with degrees in hand, would leave for better-paying jobs.