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.”
Many
employers offer tuition reimbursement. But those programs usually come
with limitations like the full cost not being paid, new employees being
excluded, requiring that workers stay 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, degrees in hand, will leave for
better-paying jobs.
Even
if they did, their experience “would be accreted to our brand, our
reputation and our business,” Howard D. Schultz, the company’s chairman
and chief executive, said in an interview. “I believe it will lower
attrition, it’ll increase performance, it’ll attract and retain better
people.”
In a low-wage service industry, Starbucks has
for decades been unusual,
doing things such as providing health insurance, even for part-timers,
and giving its employees stock options. (Like other food and drink
chains, it has also been accused of using improper tactics in fighting
unionization drives.) Whether in spite of those perks or because of
them, the company has been highly successful; its stock, which closed
Friday at $74.69, has grown in value more than a hundredfold since it
went public in 1992.
The
president of Arizona State, Michael M. Crow, something of an evangelist
for online education, was scheduled to join Mr. Schultz and Arne
Duncan, the education secretary, to announce the program on Monday in
Manhattan. Arizona State has one of the largest
online degree programs in the United States, with 11,000 students and 40 undergraduate majors, and one of the most highly regarded.
The
university and the company say they do not know how many Starbucks
employees will take advantage of the program, which includes help with
paperwork and academic advising, but they expect thousands to enroll,
and Mr. Crow said Arizona State has prepared for a major surge in
enrollment. Tuition for Arizona State’s online undergraduate courses is
usually about $500 per credit, and it takes 120 credits to earn a
bachelor’s degree.
The
Starbucks program sounds like a boon to Abraham G. Cervantes, 24, who
lives in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles with his mother and two of
his brothers, and would be the first in his family to earn a college
degree. “I’m the only one in the family with a steady job,” he said. In
fact, he has two jobs — one at Starbucks, and another at a music studio.
While
studying at a community college, he discovered classical music, and
fell in love with Chopin, Bach and Beethoven, though at home he can
practice only on a worn-out piano. He said he dreamed of being a
professor of music, but after five years of trying to mesh his class and
work schedules, he has not finished his associate’s degree.
“Working two jobs, you don’t always have time to attend school,” he said.
The
new Starbucks program “would be a huge benefit to me,” Mr. Cervantes
said, giving him flexibility and eliminating the commute to and from
school.
The
company says that in its employee surveys some of the most compelling
results are about higher education. Seventy percent of Starbucks
employees do not have a degree but want to earn one; some have never
gone to college, some have gone but dropped out, and others are in
school, but have found it slow going.
“My
dad lost his job during the recession, in my first year of college, and
my parents were really struggling for money,” said Tammie R. Lopez, 22,
who would also be the first in her family to finish college. “They were
on the verge of losing their home, so I stopped going to school so I
could get a second job and help them.”
Ms. Lopez, who lives in the San Fernando Valley, got a full-time job at Starbucks and goes to a community college at night.
“I
could never see myself finishing school because it’s taken me so long
to get where I am,” Ms. Lopez said. She is studying to be a sign
language interpreter, but is also weighing other possibilities, such as a
business degree. What Starbucks has planned, she said, completely
changed her outlook.
“I
could be done with school in a couple of years — I can see it, that
financial burden would be lifted,” she said. “Even if I had an emergency
and I had to go out of town, I would be able to take my computer with
me and not miss class.”
Mr.
Schultz, the Starbucks chief, said such stories strike a personal chord
with him. He grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and an athletic
scholarship enabled him to be the first in his family to attend college,
at Northern Michigan University.
He
and Mr. Crow said they met a few years ago when Mr. Schultz spoke at
Arizona State, and got to know each other while working with the Markle
Foundation, a charitable public policy organization. They found they
shared modest backgrounds and concerns about growing inequality.
“The
middle class is being hollowed out in so many ways,” Mr. Crow said.
Unless more people become educated, he said, “We can all see this social
train wreck ahead of us.”
It
is a wreck that Michael Bojorquez Echevarria, 23, another Starbucks
barista in the San Fernando Valley, can see clearly, and is struggling
to avoid. He grew up in the Bay Area, the child of immigrants from
Mexico, and saw the limitations that a lack of education had placed on
them, he said, adding that he has always believed that “I have to be one
of those people who can say we made it.”
“My
ultimate vision, what I’m striving for, is to work with children who
have gone through physical or emotional abuse,” he said.
For
now, he is working toward an associate’s degree in sociology. He works
about 60 hours a week at two different Starbucks locations, where he
said the regular customers asked about his studies and egged him on.
“Imagine
just waking up one day and knowing that your whole degree would be paid
for, and the only thing you have to do is enroll and study and be a
good student,” he said. “It would change my lifestyle, the whole dynamic
of what I do every day.”