Walmart will begin offering to subsidize college tuition for its U.S. workers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Wow, raising the wage combined with this tuition assistance makes it seem like Walmart is actually trying not be known as the worst employer out there anymore - these benefits are better than some of the retail jobs I used to work a few years ago. I wonder why they suddenly care? Walmart gets its customers because they have low prices (or at least successfully trick people into thinking they have low prices), the kind of people who value that are unlikely to stop shopping at Walmart because of the negative PR around how they (used to) treat their workers.
Walmart isn't worried about losing the people shopping at Walmart. They just need to continue to sell cheap food, clothes, and household things in order to keep them.
Walmart has always promoted from within. I bet very few people have worked part time in Walmart for 1+ year while going to college for a business degree and not been shortlisted for a promotion. The college subsidy will give them more managers with ground floor experience.
Walmart is very concerned about how to grow their customer base. You see this with the 2day online shipping, site to store, and their grocery pickup program. The increase in wage is a direct attempt to increase employee retention and attract better employees. This is about growth, not loss prevention.
This was my immediate first thought, retention and loyalty.
A few months ago my mother retired from Wal-Mart after working as a manager for 30+ years, and I've heard all the "fun" stories. Just about every trope regarding lazy, slack ass workers who routinely no-call-no-show, get fired, then somehow rehired six months later is true. There are good employees, to be sure, but they're greatly outnumbered by the unmotivated, and unwilling.
I see this as a way to pull in and retain driven employees, no different than a software company sponsoring scholarships at a university and simultaneously offering internships / future employment. You'll select for the more driven, hard-charging folks and, hopefully, engender a positive opinion of your company in the eyes of the recipients.
What about the lazy, slack ass management that routinely yank hours, refuse to give full-time hours that offer health insurance?
It's not always everything, but having a manager who was once in the shit usually makes a big difference. Hopefully this program will get more folks who have worked their way up the ranks and know what works so there's better, more informed, and more compassionate management at the store level and higher.
Working for Walmart isn’t a fantastic experience, but promoting from within is a great practice they have.
A close friend of mine from high school started worked at Walmart while attending University. Interestingly enough, she was a business undergrad and, as you suggest, she was shortlisted to management before even finishing her undergraduate degree. She went on to get an MBA and went corporate within Walmart and is still there today, nearly 20 years later.
> The college subsidy will give them more managers with ground floor experience.
Given the above anecdote, I wonder if their decision to subsidize college is just tied to how grossly expensive an undergraduate degree is today vs. yesteryear.
In any event, they will continue to pull managers from the "competent" pool of employees internally and get good PR at the same time.
It's not.
One of the 3 colleges in this new program is Univerity of Florida, which charges $6,381/yr, before substantial financial aid offering. https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmp...
They were for a long time, especially when they didn't collect sales tax. Many people just stopped comparison shopping and haven't realized the situation's changed.
> but they’re just the most convenient.
Not necessarily. Oddly enough, Best Buy is the most convenient for me (for electronics), and it's usually not any more expensive than Amazon, at least for the stuff I buy. Amazon less convenient due to the hassle with their delivery delays and packing materials.
They will also price match Amazon in most cases. I hear a lot of people complain about Best Buy but I’ve made a few big purchases at my local Best Buy store and their employees were super helpful and friendly. I’d much rather shop there and get the item immediately rather than wait two days, personally.
Almost everything else, I tend to favor Amazon though. But I find myself looking locally more and more.
Made no sense for me to pay more ($20 across 4 bulbs) to get them that day in person.
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-buy-punishes-customers-f...
I half-jokingly asked the gentleman helping me if we could price match, and how long that would take. He said that if their automated system "accepted it" then it'd be instant.
Their system did accept it pretty much immediately, and so I saved $2 for about 90 seconds 'delay' (half of which was borderline laughter/seeing if I was serious; I was only half-serious).
Made for a positive experience for me and my wife, and I now won't hesitate to consider Best Buy, via price match, in the future if I'm ordering something that they stock locally. It was also the first time I'd ever asked for a price match in the last 10+ years, if ever. :)
Buying anything that you expect to keep more than a year is a waste at Walmart, even if its cheaper.
Full Disclosure: I'm a WM Associate, but am speaking on my own. This type of behavior is against our Code of Ethics, and would be sent to investigation.
You'll find the following:
LG TV Serial:ABC123WM at walmart
LG TV Serial:ABC123BB at best buy
It's called managerial plausible deniablity. And this tactic is very much welcomed across all stores, as it prevents comparison shopping.
I THINK this is along the lines of your request. I read this when it was published (2006) and didn’t reread it when I searched for it now. Describes a culture of lowering quality to achieve sales at prices dictated by WM, as I recall. Sorry, want to be more complete but unable at this moment.
many electronics manufacturers, however, do create "black friday" versions of their products. this is well-documented. i think this practice is the origin on the claim made by the GP.
BestBuy: "Sorry, but that Walmart price is actually a different TV model."
Caveat: only if you need a car anyways. If you only need a car to run errands, Amazon is pretty competitive for pretty much anything except fresh groceries.
What is true is that there are people who live in cities and use Zipcar, Uber, regular rentals, etc. instead of owning. If that's the case, the cost calculus changes if you need to pay in order to run errands.
I'm not sure which "couple of cities" you're thinking of, but I'm pretty sure I haven't lived in either of them. And even when I've owned a car, I've never used a car day-to-day.
I live (barely) inside the city limits of a town of 13,000 people, in a county of 37,000. My wife and I both have vehicles and we use both of them probably 80% of days - and I work remotely to boot.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...
https://lendedu.com/blog/walmart-vs-amazon/
http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-vs-amazon-which-is-ch...
What Wal-mart currently has that Amazon doesn't is a brick-and-mortar network that works. If it can make that experience much better, it can beat Amazon in the physical space for ten years while Amazon fights the learning curve.
I suppose they hope such a gesture will woo people away from Amazon and back to Walmart who cares about people, unlike Amazon.
I think that the likely culprit is a more competitive labor market in general, but there's no reason to outright reject the idea that the demand for labor could in part be driven by said tax cuts to a non-trivial extent.
Because they're historically linked to stock buybacks and M&A activity. The ROI is usually much more clear-cut.
Does anyone have evidence that a retailer of Walmart's size investing in customer service and employees nets a positive ROI?
Idk if you'd consider the two the same scale (the market cap for Wal-Mart is probably 3x that of Starbucks if I recall) so maybe that's _some_ evidence?
Though I agree evaluating/comparing the ROI on the two is probably not the cleanest analysis in the world.
The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits.
While there's currently no specific press release linking Wal-mart's actions with the tax change, it certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibility (and HN-class conclusion jumping).
No, there have been dozens or hundreds of companies claiming that tax cuts were responsible for employee compensation increases. Many of those were one-time bonuses, but the tax cuts are ongoing. In some cases where the benefits were ongoing (like Walmart's hourly pay increase), you'll find that they tend to coincide with the overall trend of state minimum wage increases. This is just PR: they're getting ahead of the trend and trying to attribute it to tax cuts rather than other forces.
Also, since employee compensation was tax-deductible even before the tax cut, taxes certainly weren't stopping companies from raising wages before the tax cut.
The tax cuts are causing increased employee benefits is a red herring.
Suppose the company is targeting $100 net profit, and has $200 income available, before taxes and "bonus wages".
At 20% tax rate, the company can pay $75 in deductible wages, plus ($(200-75)0.2) $25 in tax
At 10% tax rate, the company can pay $89 in deductible wages, plus ($(200-89)0.1) = $11 in tax.
Lower taxes enables higher wages.
Stock repurchases are filed on the balance sheet, post taxes, which is why companies take the increase in net income but then use the extra cash to buy back stock. The former keeps the company competitive and the latter increases the stock price.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/now-we-know-where-the-tax-...
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/09/news/companies/tax-cut-bonus...
First, of the companies that are doing stock buybacks, not all are doing only stock buybacks. Many are doing other things as well.
Second, there's a whole great big world out there called "local news" where you'll see these stories that aren't covered by CNN, Marketwatch, CNBC, etc...
Yes, some big companies are doing stock buybacks, but there's a lot more going on in the business world than the Fortune 500.
This follows a report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt finding that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart WMT, +1.98% and AT&T T, +0.70% gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases.
However one feels about the issue my point still stands. Th comment that started this thread gave no supporting evidence for the claim and thus deserved to be downvoted.
Also the article we are all nominally commenting on is about Walmart which is a Fortune 500 company. Is its tuition plan because of the Trump tax cuts?
Not really. There have been a lot of stories of companies offering one time bonuses to employees, despite the tax cuts being ongoing. And historically, windfalls like that have been used mainly to benefit the higher ups in the company, instead of the workers.
And it's not like Wal-Mart was hurting for money before. They could have raised pay before. Or they could have kept the tax cut money and paid it out to owners. So I'm not convinced. The tighter labor market makes a lot more sense.
A simple exercise: say you have a small business. Your tax rate is 35%, gross revenue is 200k, tax-deductible expenses are 100k (1 or _maybe_ two employees). We'll assume a C corporation, just for illustration purposes and that you care about the after-tax profit it generates. In practice for something this small you would probably just pay yourself a salary and be done with it...
Anyway, you have 100k taxable income, and 65k after-tax profit. If you paid your employees more, you would have less after-tax profit, because your tax rate is not 100%.
Now say the tax rate drops to 21% (this is the cut that happened) and you give your employees a 10% raise. Now you have 110k expenses, 90k taxable income, 71.1k after-tax profit.
So a tax cut in this situation does in fact allow an employer to both have more after-tax profit _and_ give raises to employees at the same time.
Now we can have a discussion about what government services the employees and the employer won't get as a result of the tax cut, of course. That needs to be accounted for too, in the grand scheme of things.
I'm not sure what you're asking.
The 35 -> 21 change is the actual corporate tax rate change that happened end of last year in the US.
You don't _have_ to pay your employees more to be taxed at the 21% rate. But at the new tax rate you _can_ pay your employees more and till make more of a profit.
So in the end the whole question is where the money that would have been paid in taxes goes instead. It could be going to stock buybacks, dividends, investment in the company, raises for employees, or just sitting in the company bank account. In real life the answer is probably "all of the above" and the proportions vary.
Again, I'm not sure whether I answered your question, because I'm not sure what you're asking.
You would think it a silly idea: educating people into certifications that overqualify them and likely lead to their exit to greener pastures. There is the other end of the pipe to consider: students leaving high school would see Walmart employment as a way to afford their education - providing an everlasting stream of new employees. In addition, Walmart relies on successful innovators to stock their shelves with compelling products. This is selfish positive sum reasoning[1], where doing good ironically results in more for you.
That's my best guess, at least.
So, if 10% of employees start, less than 1% will finish. I think there's probably more than enough room for 1% of their employees to move up. Also, great PR form.
I don't think it has anything to do with image. Just basic market dynamics. They need more, better, and more reliable employees. So they're offering a better value. That, or one of the Waltons has decided to get in on this sweet presidenting business and they're tossing a few bones out for 2020.
Worth noting the Fred Meyer nearby is also going the same direction. They just installed a ton of self checkout lanes and it seriously works well too. The store was absolutely packed this last weekend but there was hardly a wait to checkout.
IMHO it's a step in the right direction. Corpos are soulless and people vote with money. Take your $ somewhere else and they'll try to meet the bar.
Amazon's tough love is also well-known at least from what I've read so having an upper hand over them may sway the lazy but compassionate crowd to take a ride to Walmart, not amazon.com.
> Nearly 46% of Walmart’s 1.5 million US workers are African American.
Walmart's stock is up 2% so far. I think that's what they always have cared about the most.
But on the other hand, I can't blame Walmart or any other non-education company for high tuition and I think it's good they give employees the opportunities to get a practical college education.
> The Walmart employees will not be obligated to continue working for the company after they get their degrees, and must put up only $1 a day toward the cost of classes.
This is literally the classic CFO/CEO exchange:
CFO asks CEO: What happens if we spend money training our people and then they leave?
CEO: What happens if we don't and they stay?
I don’t think this program is anywhere near as bad as that healthcare structure, but this is just another case of corporations taking up what could have been a responsibility of the state.
It’s better than both corporations and government leaving people in the wind though.
The people above you will never give you the education needed to overthrow them.
I think that contributes to the dystopia. Then companies get more power, controlling who gets educated, the content of their education, the method, etc. If it became widespread, how much influence would companies have over universities? Would research detrimental to corporations be possible?
Democracy is a great thing; it gives power to the citizens. If we cut back government, we redistribute that power to the already powerful people and institutions. (To be clear, there is a balance to be had; government is good for somethings (e.g, defense, justice, education and health care), private business is good for others (e.g., making cars and software).
> If we cut back government, we redistribute that power to the already powerful people and institutions.
I reject the implicit assumption that there is a "conservation of power" law at work. Just look at authoritarian states vs freer countries: there is no entity in the freer countries exercising totalitarian control over the citizens. This means that the total power exerted on the individual is not conserved.
A workers dystopia has already happened, unions and legal changes to work hours & pay got rid of it. As unions lose power (rightfully, due to colluding with the bosses) and laws are torn down to remove regulation, these conditions will return. Zuckerberg and Google both want to build "cities". For who? Their employees.
They did, but over the last 50 years or so, we've seen the erosions of union power and the erosion of legal protections for workers. Don't imagine that the fight is over; it's still ongoing.
UF's business program takes a TINY portion of community college transfers each year and sadly most of them fail out of the weed out courses in the first year.
I am very skeptical of how many Walmart employees will be able to take advantage of this program. Can anyone with experience at the other schools listed in this article speak to the difficulty of getting in to them?
Obviously this isn't true for true Ivy-league schools, but it does tend apply even to larger state schools, such as the ones in this article.
Adults going in and paying their way are more likely to stay focused and complete.
25% of Ivy League students are there because their parents are rich alumni, so it does apply to Ivy League schools too.
You can also find a number of books written about 1st year MBA experiences on this general theme.
This isn't the one I was thinking of and I only found it because I vaguely know the author.
Peter Cohen's The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School is another older one.
There's a third I was thinking of but I don't see it on my shelf and it seems to be Google resistant.
At the time, the school (which was a moderately elite one) even had a "math camp" prior to classes beginning for those who weren't comfortable with their math skills. But obviously there's not a lot you can do for students who are essentially at a grade school level.
> These retail jobs need to pay a living wage.
1) A living wage for which city/state and 2) Does this include part time workers and 3) Define part time?
If that's not possible, then it should be a living wage for a nearby town including the cost(s) of transportation to/from the job.
IE, someone in an "entry level" position is someone who has partial support in their household.
Of course, there's plenty of good discussion to have about the ethics of this kind of employment. Needless to say, I prefer to spend my dollars are stores where "entry level" employees are teenagers, retirees who just want to get out of the house, and people who need an extra opportunity to make an honest life.
In many rural areas, $11 / hour is a living wage. Not comfortable, surely, but feasible.
They all subsidize low paid labor with social welfare benefits. Which is exactly what the US does as well. The US now has a more generous welfare state than Canada.
You can just about count the number of nations requiring a proper living wage on one hand out of 195.
Medical debt is still the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. Our systems are abysmal:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-...
That is a flat out lie.
And those countries all have higher tax rates to pay for their social safety net, and they actually work toward getting people to use it. Here in the US, we're actively working to gut the safety net.
I went to a school that's ranked in the top 3 for supply chain programs. And despite not being in the supply chain program myself, I stumbled into a 6 month internship with a company consistently ranked in the top 2-3 for supply chain.
Walmart is the type of company that invents supply chain management methods which eventually get taught in schools. In a similar fashion to how Google invents solutions and releases whitepapers around those concepts that spawn entire ecosystems of concepts and systems.
One thing Walmart is notorious for is how they onboard new suppliers. They effectively dictate the margins they'll let you have on a product. If you tell them that isn't possible, their SCM division will look over your internal processes with the fervor of a forensic accountant, and tell you exactly what you need to do to shape up your operations and get to the level they demand. If you're a fledgling company that scored a Walmart contract, it can be incredibly helpful in rapidly evolving your SCM/Logistics. And once you can service Walmart, you can service any company.
Although I'm not sure if that's offered for all suppliers or just their smaller suppliers that are at risk of not being able to keep up with Walmart's volume. And it's not really optional, but rather a form of risk management as well as price control. If they think you won't be able to deliver, they won't award you the contract and risk empty shelf space.
I'm curious if they'll take a similar approach to these SCM programs. None of the universities listed have ranked supply chain programs, but with Walmart directing their associates to the programs, I doubt they'll stand by and not demand changes to suite their needs. And with their expertise, they could easily catapult these programs to top ranked ones.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/retail-careers/...
$365/yr tuition at 3 public colleges, presumably on some bulk discount rate negotiated with suppliers.
At that rate, everyone attending public college should apply for a job at Walmart.
> With the new program, they will be able to obtain an associate's or bachelor's degree in either business or supply chain management (with more degree options expected to be added over time).
So it's effectively outsourced training for Walmart jobs, not a launchpad to any other skilled career.
This sounds like the plan of getting everyone a fake Canadian ID to get free healthcare.
Which, in my experience, is basically anyone who shows up consistently and can pass a drug test from time to time.
"Full- and part-time Walmart workers can use the subsidy to take courses at the University of Florida; Brandman University in Irvine, Calif.; and Bellevue University in Bellevue, Neb."
I don't know what those schools cost, but these don't appear to be nationally or even regionally ranked universities... meaning you are probably better off going to a community college and then a state college - both of which are "the expensive part is your time" even when your time can be bought for walmart floor wages.
Walmart, I think, would probably be doing better by their employees if they offered a more traditional tuition reimbursement plan, or setup deals with more local community colleges.
(that's also not a lot of schools... I'm wondering if this is for an online or mostly online program?)
Brandman appears to be linked with Chapman University and is focused on adult education. Bellevue University appears to be independent of any university and is also focused on adult education.
So my guess is UF was chosen in part because it has a long running "distance and continuing education" department?
By cutting deals with a few institutions and offering mostly online programming, Walmart can keep prices way down. I suspect they do it this way because the equivalent value of the tuition reimbursement would be way too low for any of their low-level employees to actually afford the education.
At those rates, the expensive part is the time off work, even when you are only making $11/hr. (I mean, employer reimbursement is still a nice gesture, every little bit counts.)
I find it... unlikely that the private universities are cheaper than the community colleges.
Now, your last two years, at a state school, in California are closer to six or seven grand a year, full time, so half that for your half-time plan, and that's a much bigger bite, but I still kinda wonder what kind of private school could do cheaper, though we're getting more realistic.
In California, at least, if you go to any of our very good public schools, you will almost certainly be paying more just to keep yourself alive than you will be paying in tuition
(which isn't to say I don't think we should subsidize them more; I'm just saying that most of the cost of going to california public schools is... living in California.)
> Walmart will pay only for degrees in business and supply-chain management because those areas of study “will be relevant across the industry and for future work opportunities,” according to spokeswoman Erica Jones.
They also cover books and supplies, which I imagine would be way more expensive without a single standardized curriculum across all of their employees.
Really, the options for working adults are mostly geared towards the remedial. Community college is one of the few options available to someone like me to get back on the prestigious school track.
What the hell timeline are we in right now
This is surely some sort of ploy for tax purposes, right?
If not taxes, something else, it's certainly not a common good proposal.
I mean I guess, technically neither am I but I use f# on the side, and my jaw has been continuously dropped for the past 3-4 years at how well they're handling NET as an open platform.
I use azure for my personal website and I'm impressed with azure too. I'm not really using the fancy parts of it, so maybe I'm wrong, but it has been very easy to use thus far.
On top of windows coming to ARM64, UWP eventually, and Linux sub system features, I'd say they're well on their way to abandoning the 3X MS we used to love to hate.
It’s hard to hire entry level employees and managers. This gives them a leg up on entry level competition while training new front line managers.
I’m interested to know what kind of deal they struck with the three schools, as they’re a demanding customer.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/business/walmart-memo-...
Hmmm... sounds _very_ restricted. This feels like either a PR stunt, or they're catering to programs that only allow Walmart employees to grow within Walmart and not branch out elsewhere.
The lack of detail seems really suspect.
I like Walmart's supposed intentions, but this action makes the core problem with higher education in America worse.
If enough companies begin offering this as a perk college tuition prices will just keep inflating.
It was right after WWII that companies started subsidizing healthcare. Before that, most items were paid for with cash.
That resulted in...well you know the deal.
Web search shows the opposite:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/what-the-20-largest-retailer...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/target-wi...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/11/walmart-to-boost-starting-wa...
Target's marketing division is analogous to Walmart's supply chain division, in terms of level of optimization and sophistication.
>retailer said it would pay tuition for its workers ... to earn degrees in either supply chain management or business.
If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous (and I would imagine unhealthy) set of citizens. Even if the faith that capitalism will more efficiently distribute money than government would holds true, it's not necessarily a better outcome.
It's not that I don't appreciate the actions, it's that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that oligarchy means working people are beholden to an unaccountable group of affluents. It's like we're outsourcing the government's responsibility for collective welfare.
There's historically been substantial investment in universities and colleges, but that was always about increasing the number of people with those educations (economic development in other words) and never about universal higher education.
Nowadays there's lots of people pursuing professional education and the support available to each individual has been declining (this may still cost lots more than higher levels of support that existed when fewer people sought degrees).
The fact that so many shop at Walmart is what keeps the Walton family wealthy. Why would it be wrong to expect them to pay that back in some way? Nobody is saying they should go broke doing it, but they owe their success not only to their business acumen and good decisions but to the people that continue to shop there in the face of alternatives.
We have a lot of people graduating with useless degrees like History & Literature. These useless degrees often land people in a state of debt with no job. If a corporation(s) decides what degree you should get, there is a higher likelihood that at the end of your degree, you'll actually get a job.
I use those History skills daily from writing documentation, synthesizing concepts into a coherent work, and figuring out the intent of the original coder.
My History degree is definitely not useless.
I realize that history-related careers are not something I am well-versed in. Can you elaborate on this point? What kind of career is best prepared for by taking a History degree? (We'll assume that any kind of professorship role in history is a no-go, given how bad the adjunct professor path is.) I might imagine someone using History as a stepping-stone to a Law degree, but cannot think of much else. Museum curator?
I am having a hard time thinking of things that would provide a labor pool large enough to have a reasonable chance of making a career of. It's very likely that I'm not thinking deeply enough about it, so I'd appreciate your insight.
One of the best programmers i worked with had a philosophy degree. He could distill a bunch of random subjective information down to something reasonable to implement.
It's really an education vs training sort of issue.
Or I think one could work for a place like Stratfor or the other private intelligence/business intelligence firms that are less well known.
I also think it'd be a darn hoot to be a working historian (maybe in academia maybe not) of the kind who writes history books. Really just being a historian in general though.
> I am having a hard time thinking of things that would provide a labor pool large enough to have a reasonable chance of making a career of.
Everything I mentioned was a very high variance choice no doubt. Of course you are correct. It is probably not a good choice for the vast masses of people. I would not make a choice like this unless I was at a high brow college.
welp: I am stem person though but I sometimes wistfully ponder a different path.
edit: of course history seems to prepare one well for politics
>there is a higher likelihood that at the end of your degree, you'll actually get a job.
With that company. When your healthcare and your education are controlled by a single corporation, how are you any better off than some miner in the 19th century buying his equipment from the company store?
only temporarily. Once your working CV is strong enough you're free to move to another company
It may not be perfect, but it might be better than what we have now... Although, I'm not saying it will be... I'll reserve judgement until the data arrives.
However, for every employed actor, there are probably 9 other starving drama students who will never make it. It's hard to encourage kids to take Drama with those odds unless the kid is super passionate about it... especially when it costs $60k to do so.
That sounds almost completely backwards to me. If companies are subsidizing education, it would seem that you're going to get a mix of subsidized educations that matches reality. Wal-Mart will subsidize people studying supply chain management, Tesla might subsidize people studying mechanical engineering or materials science, Google would probably subsidize people studying computer science, or mathematics, etc.
And never mind that plenty of companies, in my experience, offer education reimbursement where they define "business related" in a VERY broad fashion. I've had large corporate employers where they'd reimburse you for anything except hyper-niche stuff like "Medieval Basket Weaving" or something.
OTOH, letting the State decide what gets subsidized feels like regressing back to outdated ideas like Plato's "philosopher-kings" and a society where society decides your occupation for you, with you getting little or no voice in the matter.
And what happens when the State decides this stuff, and a bunch of evangelical Christian types gain control and suddenly the options narrow to "Christian Studies", "Creationism for Dummies", etc? Thanks, but no thanks.
The government(s) already incentives and subsidizes higher education in a number of ways.
>If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous (and I would imagine unhealthy) set of citizens.
This is an odd comment and a little unnecessarily alarmist... tuition reimbursement is not an uncommon perk for full time employees at mid-sized to large companies. Of course, since they are footing the bill, they want to get something out of it too, so you have to study something that's related to your job. So if you're working in sales you can't get reimbursement your engineering degree but you can get your marketing degree. I think this is pretty fair and doesn't lead to "homogeneous and unhealthy citizens", not everyone does the same job. Looks like Walmart is offering education for Walmart employees that could benefit from an education. If cashiers could benefit from a degree I'm sure they'd offer that too.
(You also have to get good grades to qualify for reimbursement - usually B or over.)
I suspect that's not true at many companies. I certainly know engineers who have had MBAs subsidized.
Like you said, some companies don't have restrictions for tuition reimbursement, I was just speaking from personal experience at the companies I've personally worked for all have had the "related to your job" restriction in place.
The Walmart program pays for an undergraduate business degree (kinda useless) or a degree in supply chain management (likely to be useless in the coming years).
Nice try.
A cashier does not need a college degree, a person in that type of job should be just fine without one (provided Walmart is paying enough)
> The giant retailer said it would pay tuition for its workers to enroll in college courses, online or on campus, to earn degrees in either supply chain management or business.
They're not.
Edit: I realize my original comment was glib, but it's well-documented that a large number of Walmart employees don't make enough to live on: https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...