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.
No good for anthropologists (Score:5, Funny)
In the field of anthropology, we typically get our degree first before moving on to Starbucks employment.
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Why don't you put your degree to work and go work at Anthropologie?
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That's a terrible suggestion. You should anthropologise to everyone.
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Always remember that your barista responsibilites change based on your field. As a former archaeologist, I cannot tell you how many nazis I killed while working at Starbucks.
Did you recommend the Lost Ark blend, with room for scream? I hear that one is quite the face melter, it's so hot.
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If I was in Starbucks and had ordered that double skinny latte... I would drink it, sir.
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Nothing to see here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Funny)
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Who cares what their motivation is, so long as they actually do what they say they'll do?
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"Maybe I’ll go to the real Phoenix and finish school. They’ve got one in Costa Mesa."
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Funny)
ASU has swimming pools
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filled with beer.
BSES (Score:5, Interesting)
By 2016, the average barista will need at least a 2 year degree to remain competitive. The best ones will have their BSES (Bachelor of science in espresso services)
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Is that more or less prestigious than a BA in art history or music theory or some such? I mean, sure, it has Science in it's name, but you might be better off with an Bachelors of Espresso Engineering. I hear Engineers make a lot of money.
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I would presume "real" ones. There apparently is still such a huge need for software engineers that they keep bringing in H1-B candidates. If a software engineer is unemplo.....errrr working at Starbucks, they aren't trying. Even if they took a pay cut from normal software engineer wages, it's bound to be more than Starbucks barristas make.
Re:BSES (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just tossing out a stray thought, but how much value would there be in having maybe one person at a Starbucks with some sort of culinary arts education/training? I'm sure it wouldn't be much, but it was an interesting thought I had.
Value? None. It breaks the Starbucks model. Starbucks is really just a fast-food place like McDonald's, the employees at their locations are not chefs and don't come up with the recipes. They are not supposed to make culinary decisions, they follow a specific set of procedures, and although those procedures may be more complex and require more skill than at other fast-food restaurants, they are still a set of procedures that somebody else came up with.
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"... require more skill than at other fast-food restaurants,.."
no, no it doesn't. I could argue it's less skill.
Everything is push button, and you never have to deal with grease.
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Just tossing out a stray thought, but how much value would there be in having maybe one person at a Starbucks with some sort of culinary arts education/training?
That would increase healthcare costs because Starbucks employees trained in culinary arts would need to consume a lot of antidepressants.
In civilized countries... (Score:5, Informative)
In civilized countries, education is public and fully tax-paid anyway.
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You used that trick on us for health care.
I guess you plan to use that tactic on each program you think that everyone should be paying for.
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The U.S.A. still doesn't have a real socialist health care system because you have private insurance companies in the mix.
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Let me know when we remove the insurance companies from the equation. Then we can begin to think about comparing the American Health care system to good health care systems
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and taxes are like 90% because the stupid kids decide they don't want to work in their 20's and go on mental vacations because college was so stressful
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I pay about 22% income tax on my PhD student salary of about $48000, my studies were paid by taxpayers from 1st grade all the way up to my masters degree and we get student grants which cover part of the living costs, student loans (from the state at low interest rate, not a bank) for the rest.. Tax is not high enough in my opinion, recent cuts by the current (but not for long now) right wing government have been catastrophic for our general welfare system.
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yeah, except that there are only a few universities in the country and only a minority of the kids go on to higher education
in the USA every hick redneck town has a college and almost everyone goes to college now
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Then why are American schools full of Europeans?
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Only of those Europeans that have rich families. The European universities are full of European students too (and very few North Americans), usually the not-so-rich kind.
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That doesn't make any sense. Why would Europeans even think about going to American schools if the ones in their "civilized countries" are so much better?
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It is here too, through high school.. But *college* education *shouldn't* be fully paid. Why should *I* pay for *your* education for a higher ed degree to get a better job? Why don't you pay for it yourself, or your parents pay for it (I personally think it's part of parents' duty to pay for their kids college)?
(BTW, yes, I did go to a UC. So I realize you can claim hypocrisy.. but my taxes are already paying for part of that for others.. Just not "fully tax-paid".)
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Because everyone should be granted the oppurtunity of higher studies, regardless of background and parents ability to pay. I don't come from a wealthy family by any means, if it wasn't for higher education being free, I would most likely have ended my education after high school, now I'm working on my PhD. A well educated populace is not only beneficial to the individuals who get the degrees, but to society as a whole.
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And if only you had gone to them, you would know that correlation is not the same thing as causation.
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... and in the United States, we have most of the best universities in the world.
As a United Statsian with experience in universities on both sides of the pond, your statement is quite laughable. Prestigious != 'most of the best'
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Why do people from all over the world keep coming to U.S. universities?
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Why do people from all over the world keep coming to U.S. universities?
See the parent post: prestige. Attendance at those institutions is one of the shiniest resume items that can be earned/bought/bartered.
When someone tells me that they attended an Ivy League institution, I immediately think, "Wow. You must be really smart and/or rich and/or connected."
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But if we have such a crappy educational system (and people seem to think we have had for a long time), why hasn't the prestige gone away?
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Yes. Your millionaire breeding grounds are popular for those who can afford them, further enforcing the enormous divide between rich and poor that exists in the U.S.
The other 98% get left behind.
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You mean in the US, you can get the best university degrees that money can buy.....
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Most prestigious, most awash with money, yes. What befuddles me is why these super-rich universities don't simply select the very best students all over the world (including the US), and don't offer them affordable tuition. They would be even better. As of now, most US universities simply perpetuate a rich class divide.
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Well at least the Universities with the biggest sports budgets and by far the best marketing and hype and of course ex-students who promote their universities because of course it promotes themselves by having a qualification from their. What the fuck kicking or hitting a ball around a field or dancing around wobbling your boobies and flashing your panties has to do with a quality education, I shudder to think, perhaps for pleasuring the teaching staff upon the basis of most of the freely available on the
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I was curious, so I did a quick search. The first result [topuniversities.com] seems to indicate that 7 of the top 10 universities globally are based in the US (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, University of Chicago, Caltech, and Princeton). The others that round out the top 10 are all UK schools. Of the top 25, the US has 14, but they start to drop off after that, gaining only 5 more in the next 25 ranks, bringing them to having 19 schools in the top 50, though that's still 11 ahead of the UK, which was next closest in the top 50,
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Back when we used to win wars instead of getting locked into fruitless decade-long quagmires, we also managed to subsidize college tuition more than we do now....
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]
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Kind of funny that the journal paper on rent seeking is protected by a $44 paywall...
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Um, where are you getting that from? While the general drift is reasonable, I don't know of tenured professors getting regular 10% raises. That way, they'd soon be well compensated for their workload and educational requirements. I don't know of dorms at the University of Minnesota that are less than 20 years old. I've never heard of gold-plating anything mere students would use. (Or mere faculty. That would be reserved for top administrators and football coaches.)
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.
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I think the term you're looking for is [url=http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later]Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex[/url], which he gave a stern and grave warning about as his last words before he left office.
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I know about the Military-Industrial-Complex. The thing is that, as soon as you mention it, many conservatives will put a label on you "socialist conspiracy nutjob" and move on. It's the truth, but many conservatives have been conditioned to shut off the critical thinking bits in their brains when certain words or phrases appear, which are dangerous to their ideals.
Similar thing with "Bush". If you dare to suggest that the clusterfuck that is going on in Iraq right now is the result of Bush's misguided poli
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Force of habit. Honestly I'm a little surprised that Slashdot doesn't parse BBcode these days.
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Maybe that's becasue BBCodes are the lamest and most unnecessary product of the internet?
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They work at least, hell even slashdot coped out and stopped requiring <br> or <p> (just after I had learnt to use <p> in slashdot comments, grrr) and now parses pressing "Enter".
I guess that's evil but there are a lot less comments that failed to contain newlines.
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Actually, what WWII did was show that deficit spending does help fix the economy. The thing is, the Great Depressi
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Yes, thats why the government should spend when the economy is bad, and reduces when ti's good.
We have centuries of data showing that in several large economic power houses.
But when uneducated pundits get involved misinforming people it has become a political topic as opposed to a fact based decision.
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World War 2 dragged the U.S. out of recession.
WW2 reduced private spending. The private component of GDP fell after 1941, and while the war lasted, private output never recovered to its pre-Pearl Harbor level. In 1943, real private GDP was 14% lower than it had been in 1941.
It was the end of WW2 (and perhaps co-indicdent with the destruction of Fascism and death of FDR, both large concerns of business leaders before the war) that allowed private spending to return to pre-war levels.
There were actually som
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Back when we used to win wars instead of getting locked into fruitless decade-long quagmires, we also managed to subsidize college tuition more than we do now....
Haven't we had a continued presence in Europe for 70 years now? Our presence in Japan has been a few years short of that too.
South Korea has sucked up resources for 60?
The only reason we are not in Vietnam is because we got booted out when we surrendered/lost or whatever that was.
So we seem to do this quite a bit.
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The European presence can be seen as victory acquisitions which allow for a more global reach of the US military force projection.
On the other hand, the cease fire in Korea was signed without notifying the South Koreans first - UN has itself to blame for a non-decisive conclusion there. Of course the flip side would have been a commitment to victory which had the potential for cost and escalation beyond anything anyone other than the South Koreans were willing to pay (discussing the possible ways of deterr
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Never the less, we have remained in captured territory for decades, which looked a lot like "quagmires" of the previous post.
We have stayed in various locations world wide as a matter of routine, the strategic reasons for why where not in question. Of course, we could argue about the advisability of departing Iraq and Afghanistan where we have simply unilaterally withdrawn. The current events in Iraq seem to say it is/was a bad idea.
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.
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This, exactly.
The US entry into WWII had just as much to do with incurring minimal damage as it did with ensuring that the allied nations were sufficiently depleted that they would need to lean on the US for their recovery.
The trope that the US won WWII is ridiculous and myopic. They won the entire post-war long game.
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The US had an unusually large economy before WWII, partly masked by the Depression. A lot of that "largest economy" stuff had nothing to do with any war, and more to do with a very large unified capitalistic economic system.
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Europe and Japan are not quagmires. The cost of the bases is far lower than the cost of trying to occupy an area during an active insurgency.
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That's you response?
Yeah, Putin a power hungry expansionist, clearly that was caused by social education programs.
That tells me you don't really have an argument.
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The US to the rescue! the dream of all countries mired in anti-democratic squalor. If you look around the list of recently US-"liberated" countries, even as far back as the 1950s, it could perhaps bring you back to reality.Getting the US attention is more a curse than a blessing.
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Civilized countries are not necessarily the same as militarized countries, just as a civilized man is not the same as an armed-to-the-teeth man. We have our gentlemen and we have our soldiers.
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yeah, it was called GI Bill and Army college fund. Navy and air force have their own versions. still around too
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In socialist canada, education for residents is subsidized, and student loans have reasonable terms. No free ride unless you get a scholarship.
That's not really any different than in the US. Public universities are subsidized - that's why they cost so much less than private ones (usually 25% to 50% as much). Government student loans seem pretty reasonable to me. No interest accrues so long as you're in school, repayment doesn't begin until 6 months after you graduate, and most of them have repayment terms of 10 years or so.
I went to a major public university, got my BS, and after grants/other financial aid had around $24,000 in debt to pay off
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I would like to see 0 percent interest loans of college.
We are likle to make more tax revenue later form a good education.
I wold also like to see fully funded government colleges.
Everything you like was built on education.
also tech / IT can use trades / apprenticeship mod (Score:2)
IT needs more of an trades / apprenticeship model to learning.
at some schools there is to much theory and big skill gaps in the areas covering more of the day to day skills. Yes some theory is good but parts of it are not really that useful vs learning more hands on skills in the field.
Trying to put IT work, networking both WAN and LAN, hardware work, cableing, codeing, QA, research, and others all into CS is bad as some areas need to have there own track and some are very hands with skills that you need to
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That's not what I remember about Marx [wikipedia.org]
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No, it isn't. You conclusion is far from logical, and you have no clue what socialism means.
American capitalistic anti-Russian propaganda from the 50s-70's is still at work, it seems.
Henri de Saint-Simon came up with socialism as an opposite to individualism. Individualism being the false dea that everyone is isolated and don't impact the lives of others.
Karl Marx, note the 'K', came up with, wait for it...Marxism. dun dun duuuuuun
I learned the in public school. I guess that's the advantage of being
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Not that I trust Wikipedia on everything...
When you look at the Wikipedia page on Socialism you will find Marx discussed in the Social and Political section, so where Socialism encompasses more than Marxism, Marxism is indeed socialism at its core. As Wikipedia articles go, this one isn't too bad. Read if for yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
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No, I'm saying "in general" they don't. There are the gifted few who will work just because, but the majority will fall to the temptation to be lazy if you make it easy to do so.
I'm further saying, that you will have a more productive society if folks are self reliant and not prone to dependency.
What is the business class limitation (Score:2)
Was this suppose to be a joke? Or would Starbucks want more B-School majors in their workforce?
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Was this suppose to be a joke? Or would Starbucks want more B-School majors in their workforce?
They, like most businesses that do better when the economy as a whole is doing better, have a vested interest in more people throughout the society having some sort of actual clue about how businesses operate, what money is, where jobs come from, that sort of thing.
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Schultz recognizes that the ultimate solution is to change this supply/demand balance. Technological progress means low-skilled jobs are disappearing, so the only avenue available is to reduce the number of
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By offering school it thinks it can get more people in that range to apply even if they never follow through with taking the classes.
Serious degrees (Score:5, Funny)
This is good news for all the departments of gender studies and theater programs.
Online? (Score:3)
Really? Wow. Great, but WTF?
They get free online courses? These are only a google (or itunes U) search away regardless of this partnership.
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only one school and does it transfer both ways? (Score:2)
only one school and does it transfer both ways?
IRS Rules (Score:2)
Is Starbucks also going to pay the employees' income tax on the amount of annual tuition benefit in excess of $5250?
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I think the newspaper article said $6500 out of about $20k for 2 year degree so that would be less. Not sure why the linked article says all, too lazy to search for a tie-breaker.
Re:IRS Rules / Discount Rate (Score:2)
Given that Starbucks is bringing more revenue to ASU, want to take a guess at how much Starbucks will actually be paying ASU for this benefit (if anything)? It can't be 50%. I doubt 25%. If I'd have been Starbucks, I'd have asked ASU to pay for the marketing.
Self serving... (Score:2)
"Licensed" stores not include (40% of stores) (Score:2)
How many people will actually use this? (Score:2)
How many qualifying Starbucks employees already have undergrad degrees?
How much is Starbucks playing ASU per pupil (if anything)?
What's the value (if any) of an ASU online degree (better than Phoenix, but...)?
What percentage and raw number of Starbucks employees, will choose an ASU online degree over a more traditional degree?
I'd love if the answers to those questions made this program look great, but I doubt they will, or that the cost of the program is more than its marketing value as calculated by the
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My employer won't hire a person with an online degree. They are open to fraud by people paying someone for college papers and taking tests.
Sorry, but that's just stupid. Yes, possession of any degree by itself certainly shouldn't be a sole decision making factor in choosing to hire somebody, and I would certainly be more suspicious of an online degree, although that would also depend on what institution the degree is from and what the degree is in. Of course, if the online degree was from some bogus institution that's not properly accredited, then I don't consider that a degree, I consider that fraud, but we're talking about a degree from AS
what are the developers from theory loaded schools (Score:2)
what are the developers from theory loaded schools like?