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Comment by patdennis | Hacker News Reader

Key information that's missing from the title: up to a maximum of $2,000 per year

I had the same thought, but I hopped over to the web site of the local community college and did some arithmetic. It turns out that $2,000 per year will easily cover four courses, two per semester, which is a decent part-time load. Cost works out to about $1,250 per year, plus a textbook rental fee of maybe $300 or so, depending on course selection.

This is plenty to get through community college and get a vocational certificate. A community college in Kansas runs $71 per credit hour, and you need 60 to get a 2-year AA degree. That's just over $2000/yr for the program.

http://www.kckcc.edu/academics/classSchedules/spring/tuition...

In Amazon's home state of WAshington, 1 year of tuition costs:

  Institution	Comm. Coll[1]	% of $2000	University[2]	% of $2000
  Resident	$4,000		50%		$10,347		19.3%
  Non-Resident	$9,235		21.7%		$27,831		7.2%

[1]http://www.sbctc.edu/college/f_tuition.aspx

[2]http://admit.washington.edu/Paying/Cost

If you're looking at it full time, then yes, but my partner just finished her part time AA in WA, and the peak we had for tuition/fees/books in any one year (she did it in a little over 3 years) was $2100 (the link you had shows the maximum that a community college can charge for 3 15 credit terms, not all charge that). If we had spread it out over 4 years, $2000 would have easily covered it all.

Not to say that this is an people will be lining up to get a job at an Amazon warehouse for, but it is something that can help some employees get a little ahead.

This includes colleges with football teams and Olympic swimming pools. As others have noted, education credits in WA tend to be cheap when it's just the education.

Not that it matters for home state advantage - their warehouse workers are spread across the country, not in the most north-western point of the continental US.

Go Huskies

I got through the bulk of the page thinking, "Hey, this isn't so bad". But when I got to the $2,000 maximum part I had to stop and re-read it...

What's vocational tuition like in the States? Is $2,000/year for 4 years actually going to cover most, or any of it?

It'll cover community colleges just fine. Universities is where the issue arises.

Edit: The person above me said they went to a Community College in the midwest, but I have no idea how it cost them so much. I was attending in Fresno, California, and a full semester wouldn't even get close to 1k.

Well it's $2,000 per year, not per semester. Are semesters a year long in most vocational schools?

I guess this program would work for anyone who wanted to pursue a vocational program as a part-time student while slaving away in an Amazon warehouse. :O

Maybe if this actually works well people will be joining Amazon's workforce to pay for school instead of the military. Ha!

No need to be snarky! Community colleges are far from just vocational schools.

A lot of people who work warehouse-type jobs don't have any additional money available for school. This program is an incentive to attract people who are likely to stick around at Amazon while their education is paid for. It self-selects for people willing to work harder to get ahead and my anecdotal evidence is that tuition reimbursement increases company loyalty.

$2k/year may not seem like much, but when your only other option is to work yet another job to pay for the education, or not get the education at all, then it's a huge benefit.

I have always recommended that people take advantage of tuition reimbursement: the benefit is there, why not use it? There is typically no downside, other than you have less free time. The upsides are obvious.

Four years ago I went to a community college in the rural Midwest, and $2,000 a year would probably just barely cover tuition and books. And that was by far the cheapest school I have ever encountered.

Full time or part time? I assume anyone taking advantage of this would be going part time, so the tuition would be lower.

I'm not sure what those terms means, but I was taking around 15 credit hours per semester. I also had a part time job, so I don't know if you would call that "full time" school.

Full time in my University was >= 12 credit hours per semester.

At my school, "full time" meant 4 or 5 courses per term. "Part time" was 3, 2 or 1.Also there were three terms per year.

So if a credit hour is an hour of class per week. Our classes all had 3 hours per week, so 4 classes is 12 credit hours and 5 classes is 15 credit hours. That fits the bill.

I think I understand now. I just hadn't been thinking of it in terms of "credit hours".

I got the impression it was 95% tuition plus books/assorted costs up to $2000 per year.

That was my impression as well. It's what made sense. However, that comma makes it very unclear technically.

This reeks of empty PR gesture.

$2k won't buy anything like 95% of tuition in the US will it?

This program is for vocational schools only.

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