As I've said elsewhere below, This article is clickbait. If you read to the end you'll see that Starbucks is, indeed, paying for the students' last two years of college:
> The program would work much the same way for the junior and senior years, except that Starbucks would reimburse workers for their out of pocket costs, once they completed 21 credits.
The only point the article is making is that Starbucks is not paying into the scholarship fund that goes towards students' first two years of expenses. I do not see why this, standing alone, is a big deal. To be clear, Starbucks IS PAYING out of pocket for its students' tuition. Just not 100% of it. ASU is kicking in some money as well. I don't see that this is wildly inconsistent with Starbucks' PR message about the program.
> The partnership between Starbucks and ASU will provide full tuition reimbursement for any of the company’s 135,000 U.S. employees enrolled as juniors and seniors, each time they complete 21 credit hours. While the up-front costs could be problematic for some students, Starbucks says the 21-credit system is an incentive for completion.
> ASU-funded scholarships will also help cover the cost. Juniors and seniors can get about $2,240 per 12-credit course load — undergraduate online programs cost between $480 and $543 per credit hour — and freshmen and sophomores can get $1,267 total.
The issue is that it was initially presented as an "up front" scholarship, but it is in fact a reimbursement. The difference is significant. Even the quote from your preferred article mentions that "up-front costs could be problematic for some students".
If you get a $10,000 scholarship, enroll, then decide somewhere along the line that your workload is too much and you have to withdraw, you aren't out $10,000.
With this program, if you don't hit the 21 credit mark, you are screwed.
No one is arguing that Starbucks isn't paying for school. The argument is that they were misleading about how they are paying for it.
Maybe this is AN issue, but this is certainly not the issue highlighted by the komonews.com article. The point of the article is
> It turns out Starbucks isn't contributing any upfront scholarship money to an online college degree program it introduced this week.
This is technically true, but readily misleads the reader into thinking that Starbucks is not contributing any money at all. (If you disagree, I suggest scrolling down a bit in this thread to see the reactions of your fellow HNers.) In fact, Starbucks will reimburse workers for the cost of their second two years of college--ASU and the federal government (essentially) will pay for the first two. The article does also mention this, but buries it more than halfway down.
Discouraging withdrawal could be argued to be the point, and the amount of courses you would withdraw from at once should be much less than 21 credits. Assuming you still get 21 hours of money if you complete 21 out of 29 credit hours, I don't see it as a major problem.
And this is for the Junior and Senior classes. You should already know what workload you can handle by then.
They explicitly said it was to "motivate" students to finish, but I see that as kind of a cop out answer since it's also extremely convenient for them.
As for withdrawal, yes, you should know what you can handle by junior year, but that was just one for-instance. People withdraw for all sorts of reasons (e.g. medical). I can't imagine being too sick to focus on your schoolwork and then having your "scholarship" yanked away from you because of it.
Is it better than nothing? Yes. Is it as nice as they made it out to be? No. That's the point here.
This kind of clickbait that contains absolute falsehoods in the title really frustrates me. Not everyone is going to read the article, or read to the end even if they click it, and people are going to come away with a misrepresentation of the facts.
Are they "underpaid"? What do you suggest a barista at Starbucks make? Regardless of the details, their workers get a discount on a college education. Seems like a nice perk for doing a job that the majority of people can do.
So we're gonna pile on Starbucks for negotiating lower tuition fees for their employees. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Consider that if they had no program at all, they wouldn't be getting the bad press right now. This article is asking us to punish Starbucks for doing something, because it doesn't conform to some childish stereotype for the proverbial rich giving some of their infinite money to the poor.
I understand your perspective, but it should be pretty clear while people are going to "pile on Starbucks". If they had come out and said that they negotiated lower tuition fees for their employees, they'd have gotten a small PR bump and some deserved good will. However, they were intentionally misleading.
Furthermore, there's a pretty good chance that a large number of folks who got wind of the original PR blitz will never hear this follow-up story. Starbucks' PR team took an intentional calculated risk in running the story the way that they did. The savvy public has a moral obligation to make these sorts of scummy marketing bets produce a lower expected value.
I agree that what Starbucks is doing is admirable whether or not they're putting up their own money.
But what irritates me, for one (and, I'd wager, other HNers), is that if this article is true, then the Starbucks PR blitz accompanying this decision has been, at best, badly misleading. I seem to recall, for example, Howard Schultz's making an appearance on the Daily Show the other day and telling the American public that paying tuition for all their workers was going to cost them millions upon millions of dollars. If that was a lie, it seems to me that's worthy of condemnation.
EDIT: This article is clickbait, and it fooled me. If you read to the end you'll see that Starbucks is, indeed, paying for the students' last two years of college:
> The program would work much the same way for the junior and senior years, except that Starbucks would reimburse workers for their out of pocket costs, once they completed 21 credits.
Well the problem I see is that this could change the intent of Starbucks. Perhaps it wasent about them wanting to help employees, but instead was a mutually beneficial program for Starbucks and ASU. With online courses and MOOCs being seen as a new way to raise funds for schools, perhaps this is just a marketing tool for ASU to increase enrollment and attract attention (obviously this would happen for ASU either way, but if that was the goal that seems like a substantial change to the nature/effect of the program).
If Starbucks was making a bigger financial investment, it would indicate they were really doing this because they value the benefits of education enough to trade the financially tangible for the intangible.
With this clarification, that seemingly falls out the door. Im not sure how I feel about that. Its still a good program, because at the very least it is encouragement.
EDIT: So it seems this isnt the whole story. So its good to see Starbucks is indeed contributing, which one again, changes their intent.
Yeah the article seems stupid, while technically they aren't contributing to the scholarship they do pay tuition for the last 2 years.
I'm not the biggest fan of starbucks, mostly because their coffee doesn't taste that good, however, I don't why what they've done shouldn't be applauded.
It's kinda funny that I see more people upset about the business practices of Starbucks/Wal-Mart than Lockheed Martin.
> The program would work much the same way for the junior and senior years, except that Starbucks would reimburse workers for their out of pocket costs, once they completed 21 credits.
The only point the article is making is that Starbucks is not paying into the scholarship fund that goes towards students' first two years of expenses. I do not see why this, standing alone, is a big deal. To be clear, Starbucks IS PAYING out of pocket for its students' tuition. Just not 100% of it. ASU is kicking in some money as well. I don't see that this is wildly inconsistent with Starbucks' PR message about the program.
This article is much more informative: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/starbucks-ceo-howard-s...
> The partnership between Starbucks and ASU will provide full tuition reimbursement for any of the company’s 135,000 U.S. employees enrolled as juniors and seniors, each time they complete 21 credit hours. While the up-front costs could be problematic for some students, Starbucks says the 21-credit system is an incentive for completion.
> ASU-funded scholarships will also help cover the cost. Juniors and seniors can get about $2,240 per 12-credit course load — undergraduate online programs cost between $480 and $543 per credit hour — and freshmen and sophomores can get $1,267 total.