I’ve written a number of times over the past year about how MOOCs can impact the corporate world and provide a more just in time form of learning that is fit for the 21st Century. So it was interesting to read news earlier this month about the partnership Starbucks have formed with Arizona State University.
The partnership will see Starbucks provide employees a free online education to any employee working over 20 hours of week with the company. The courses will be provided by Arizona State University via a MOOC style platform.
In a nice break with more formal means of learning, there is no requirement that any employee taking the courses must remain at the company for a period of time after completion. There is however an intellectual bar for employees to clear before they can enroll. Starbucks state that employees wishing to enroll must have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State.
“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.”
The partnership will give many employees the opportunity to get a fully paid for university education, which is undoubtedly great. I can’t help but think that they could have gone much further. After all, the company has around 135,000 employees, many of whom will probably not meet the criteria required to enroll on the course, but who may nonetheless have benefited from consuming the content. As the cost for each new ‘student’ is marginal, that would have seemed a rather easy way to provide benefits to a lot of employees.
They have also of course limited their corporate college to a single institution, which, whilst it no doubt helped to set things up initially, does nevertheless rather limit what could potentially be achieved.
Suffice to say, Starbucks aren’t the first organization to go down this route. SAP for instance have their Open SAP platform, which aims to offer employees and other people interested in the SAP environment, a range of courses on topics that the company believe are key to success in the SAP world. The big difference, of course, is that SAP courses don’t come with university accreditation, which you could argue is less relevant in a tech world where GitHub and TopCoder profiles are the new form of resume, but does mark an interesting distinction nonetheless.
If you were, or are, a Starbucks employee, would this development interest you?
But where will all the other art history majors who can't find jobs work?
Well, this may or not be good for employees. The problem is that online universities have rather abysmal graduation rates–usually about 10% (University of Phoenix and Western Governors), which would get a normal university in some trouble with accrediting agencies.
It seems ASU gets more bodies for its online classes, and Starbucks gets some nice PR in an industry that constantly gets shafted for poor treatment of workers. Starbucks probably is getting a sweet discount from ASU by using ASU exclusively, however I question how much this measure actually helps baristas, especially if this online college benefit takes away from other potential benefits.
This is welcome news. Now if they could make a decent cup of coffee, Starbucks would really be in business. But in all seriousness, I think this is a nice thing to do for the employees. It's a nice change of pace from the typical news of employees getting the shaft.
I read recently that Starbucks aren't actually contributing any money to this project. I shouldn't be surprised, but given the PR they get out of this, that nevertheless has surprised me.
Yes, that's right Dan. I think the 'value' Starbucks bring to the deal is that through the numbers of people they offer to ASU, they have secured a group discount essentially. That's about the nub of it.
People still wouldn't get the discount if they weren't Starbucks employees though, so they are still gaining value in that sense. I'm still not convinced this will help Starbucks much at all. The SAP site you mention seems much more attuned to the actual business involved, but time will tell.
All big organisations should be doing something like this. I mean imagine if the NHS offered this to its 100,000 or whatever employees. It would be tremendous.
Indeed Simon, I think someone like the NHS could benefit hugely from something like this.