Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, announced Wednesday that it will pay for its workers to go back to school — as long as they get degrees in business or supply-chain management.

 

The retailer is partnering with three universities to offer associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to 1.4 million part-time, full-time and salaried Walmart and Sam’s Club employees — a pitch to improve employee retention rates and engagement at work, while also drawing new workers. Walmart will cover the costs of tuition, books and fees, while employees will be required to pay $1 a day for the duration of their studies.

 

“We know there [are] a lot of benefits from a business perspective,” Drew Holler, vice president of people innovation for Walmart U.S., said on a call with reporters. “We know we’re going to see an influx of applications.”

 

When one speculates, or projects from current trends, what the future of education will look like, say in five or ten years, one of the possible models is the “business or employer” as training, learning, and education source. This is not something brand new, as probably about 4 or 5 years ago now, local online educational developers noted how McDonald’s was putting “online workstations” in their restaurants, in the back, for some of their employees.

McDonalds’s wanted to train up and fill in the education of those already working for them who had potential to become employees at “higher levels” of admin, and found putting a learning outlet right there’d in the workplace was both a convenient, and an efficient way to accomplish those goals. Another note: In Mexciso it is not unusual to find educational facilities built as part of a factory complex, where the workers spend part of their day being students, and part of the day working on the assembly line.

Obviously a program that affects such a very broad category of individuals has myriad implications, including  fundamental questions about who should or might  be responsible for education.If corporations can be successful at much lower costs than higher ed in the US, (and even say, HS ed in the US.) where does that lead?

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Now along comes Walmart, another gigantic employer in the US and world economy, saying they want to do something very similar to McDonalds, but they are going many steps further in how universal such learning access will be for their employees. 

As the article below explains, Walmart wants to send employees to online education with providers who are accredited, but exist more on the margins of what we picture when we think of “higher education”. Such an influx of resources and students into these programs is bound to greatly speed up innovation and development of the means to learn what Walmart wants employees to learn. Of course, there’s questions about what if employee/students want to learn material outside of what Walmart approves or supports? Big question. The initial program seems to focus on developing employees to help serve Walmart in it’s logistical challenges, such as they are recognized as already being good at. 

It says, that part of the motivation for offering the program is to retain the better employees with higher capabilities. An employment opportunity which contains  incentives or perks can and should serve both the needs of the employer and the employee.. Somehow in the US healthcare became part of an incentive or perk to employees that employers felt a need to offer.

[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Walmart-to-offer-employees-a-college-education-for-1-a-day-The-Washington-Post.pdf”]

Of course a healthy workforce is a LOT more efficient, and may prevent having to replace a worker with someone who needs to get trained up at cost to the company. But employers shouldering a significant part of health costs, has been cited for years as putting US companies at a disadvantage with other countries where business doesn’t pay those costs.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

However complex the circumstances might be that has produced the healthcare system in the US, it is still evolving as various Tech and Venture Cap giants seek to establish their own Healthcare systems using cloud tools, and AI. Is it too big a jump in our imagination to see the same process underway for the other huge part of the US economy, the educational system?