Starbucks paid full tuition for baristas with no strings attached

Nearly half of US college students who start a degree never finish it, and cost, debt, and the difficulty of balancing full-time work with coursework are consistently cited among the biggest reasons why. Starbucks employed a workforce made up largely of young, part-time retail workers for whom that trade-off was especially sharp: staying employed at Starbucks and finishing a degree competed directly for the same hours.

On June 15, 2014, at Starbucks' first Partner Family Forum in New York, CEO Howard Schultz and Arizona State University President Michael Crow announced the Starbucks College Achievement Plan: full tuition coverage for eligible US partners working an average of 20 hours a week, pursuing any of more than 40 undergraduate degrees through ASU's online program.

The design choice that made the plan unusual wasn't the tuition coverage itself — plenty of employers offer some tuition assistance — but the absence of any retention hook attached to it. ASU's own announcement was explicit: "Partners will have no commitment to remain at the company past graduation." A normal corporate education benefit ties the payout to a service commitment (reimbursement after completing a term, a payback clause if you leave early); Starbucks instead paid tuition upfront with no legal claim on the employee's future time at all, betting that the goodwill and reputation of an