Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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