Go to the site and watch the video. Warning–you may need tissues. This is really powerful and significant opportunity Starbucks is offering to its employees. It is also exciting to see the partnership between Starbucks and Arizona State University (ASU).
Starbucks is partnering with ASU Online to provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers. 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.
Considering the high cost of education in the US and the decrease in government funding for higher education it is encouraging to see large corporations step up and help their employees. Perhaps in the future these sorts of programs will become part of the employee benefits packages that companies use to attract the best workers.
Will we see something like this in Canada? Difficult to speculate but the reality is the provincial governments are cutting funding to higher education at a consistent pace and we have heard from a variety of Ministries of Education that more funding cuts are coming so we may start to see similar moves by Canadian corporation–at least I hope that we would see this type of response.
Learn more about the Starbucks College Program & ASU Online.
