Starbucks Offers Workers 2 Years of Free College 169
mpicpp writes Starbucks baristas working through college are about to get an extra boost from their employer. The company announced it will offer both full and part-time employees a generous tuition reimbursement benefit that covers two full years of classes. The benefit is through a partnership with Arizona State University's online studies program. Employees can choose from any of more than 40 undergraduate degrees, and aren't limited to only business classes.
Nothing to see here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In civilized countries... (Score:1, Insightful)
... and in the United States, we have most of the best universities in the world.
Re:In civilized countries... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, what happened to those days was that gradually, colleges realized they could keep raising prices past what the government could pay, because they knew families of students could pay more. Colleges built palaces to "education", dormitories with gold plated faucets, gymnasiums, new buildings that were completely unnecessary simply because they could. All the while, tuition kept going up - the government saw that tuition was increasing at universities, so they'd raise the amount of subsidy, then the college would raise tuition above that to the point where families were bled just as much as before. Eventually, the bottom dropped out, the government said enough is enough, and held or dropped subsidies. Colleges, so used to 10% pay raises for tenured professors and unwilling to live with 20 year old dorms, screamed - "they're cutting our funding!" - so they just saddle their students with the maximum loan allowance they can - because they know they can get it - just to keep the gravy train coming. The more the government allows students to borrow, the more money colleges will charge.
It's economics at work. It's called Rent Seeking Behavior [wikipedia.org]. If there is money to be gotten, it will be.
Here's a journal paper someone wrote on it. [jstor.org]
Here's a bunch of resources on this from a think tank. [econlib.org]
Re:In civilized countries... (Score:4, Insightful)
World War 2 dragged the U.S. out of recession. Since then, the military and all the ecosystem surrounding it has become a cornerstone of U.S. economy The modern idea is not to win wars, but to have perpetual war. A reason to pump all that tax money into U.S. arms industries, making some people rich and allowing many others to keep their jobs; workers, engineers, managers, contractors, lobbyists.
To enable this "economic system" that puts money into military instead of more productive endeavors or social welfare, you need a constant threat. A constant legitimacy to put money into defense and a patriotic citizenship to go along with it.
Re:BSES (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In civilized countries... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are terrible counterexamples, because US investments in Europe [washingtonpost.com], South Korea [stanford.edu] and Japan [wikipedia.org] easily payed themselves back a thousand fold. The cold war was really a form of modern mercantilism. Whereas 18th century mercantilist empires took raw materials from their dependent nations and sent back manufactured goods, 20th century mercantilists (the US, and to a lesser extent the USSR) built silos abroad and sold arms and bonds to their dependent nations. In return the US got enormous shares of stock in companies like Renault, Dassault, Volkswagen, Daimler, Samsung, and Nippon, sources of cheap manufactured goods, and Iranian oil (Saudi oil after the Shah was overthrown).
We Americans like to pretend that we have the largest economy in the world because our parents and grandparents were harder working, more intelligent, and more creative than foreigners. The reality is that we are on top because we were the only nation to come out of the second world war unscathed (thanks you, Atlantic Ocean), and we used that position to take advantage of everyone else.
Winning wars = winning money. Fighting 13+ year unwinnable wars = losing money, but that is a separate issue.