Home Scandal and Gossip Walmart offers its employees college degrees.

Walmart offers its employees college degrees.

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Soon you will need a degree to flip a burger.

It used to be if you couldn’t get into college or barely finish your high school certificate the next best thing waiting for you was a lifetime of working flipping burgers or sorting through shopping aisles at favorites Mcdonalds and Walmart respectively. Now though comes a new plan to get the disenfranchised educated.

NY Times:

The purveyor of inexpensive jeans and lawnmowers is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a Web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees.

The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees to earn credits in areas like retail management and logistics for performing their regular jobs.

One would intuitively wonder if having an educated workforce in those positions there in the first place would be the right way to go, but at least Walmart has recognized that getting its employees up to speed is the right way to go. Of course maybe the comparatively low wages Walmart offers (at least to its ground crew) could be a big reason why the chain doesn’t find college graduates working in management in the first place.

The university will offer eligible employees 15 percent price reductions on tuition, and Wal-Mart will invest $50 million over three years in other tuition assistance for the employees who participate.

15 percent price break? Some employers actually go out of their way to meet their employee’s entire college costs, one wonders if this is just not a clever way for Walmart to get into the online education pool and ferret future employees out of such programmes. In any event it could be interesting to know soon you will need a degree in flipping burgers.







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