Comments

1
Oh for fuck's sake, nothing will make you happy, will it?

Isn't a program that's something, even if not perfect, better than nothing? Or are you so intent on complaining that nothing short of a perfect world will do?

The perfect is the enemy of the good. How about we start encouraging more good things instead of always tearing them down?
2
and what about little ol' Dick's burgers which has had an employee higher-ed funding program in place for decades? here-ish
3
I wonder if Bauhaus offers this. Oh wait......
4
@2 Dick's has already hinted they'll be dropping or cutting back on their college program when wages go to $15 an hour. That's what we call an unintended consequence.
5
It's the first time Starbucks has done it. I like Starbucks, but they do get a bit hyperbolic about their accomplishments. The first time a light roast is available. The first time brewable coffee has been drinkable. The first time mugs were made in the U.S. The first time beer and wine were sold at a cafe.
6
My boyfriend works for Starbucks, and he seems pretty happy with it. He's also one of those high-performing workers.

created a monopoly on college ventures for Starbucks employees.


Monopoly implies a company controlling an entire market. Or, rather, that is *exactly* what "monopoly" means. I'm pretty sure Starbucks employees can still be educated elsewhere if they're willing to fund it themselves.
7
Wow, seeing all the insightful comments gives me hope for Stranger readers. It's a perk for workers...NOTHING GOOD TO SAY ABOUT STARBUCKS OFFERING A NEW PERK TO ITS WORKERS? And as #3 pointed out, are the "local, organic, sustainable, hipsterific" coffee shops offering anything similar? No, but they're the ones people like Ansel love.
Bottom line is that unless you're management NO ONE should be making a career out of Starbucks, if you do then you deserve poverty. Not too long ago people used the term "job" and "real job". Don't like the pay that only a college student could live off of that Starbucks offers? Well, get a better job. That simple.
And Ansel, while you're making fun of capitalism, why not look at the ads on this blog that pay your salary. Last time I checked they weren't for non-profits or government programs...
8
If you didn't catch Schultz's last statement on The Daily Show, this is all stemming from the $15/now fight.

He used that stupid phrase "total compensation," which makes me think they're backing Meinert's ass backward point of view. They want to push for "higher" minimum wages, but probably also start pushing for "total compensation" to be part of the base wage, including benefits like health care, tips, and now tuition reimbursement.

Note that he also hid behind small businesses in that same paragraph. At least Starbucks isn't franchised, so they won't benefit from that lawsuit.
9
I guess a subsidized inferior online college program biased towards the corporate view of things from a single notorious inferior online college is better than no benefit at all, but c'mon Starbucks, you can do a lot better than this attempt to cloak a deal designed to enhance image and profit margins as a public service . How about paying for any community college class from any accredited CC if you really care?
10
I'm not a big fan of Ansel, but acting like having ad revenue invalidates any critique of capitalism is idiotic (since, yeah, we're living in a market economy, so we kind of have to have ad revenue don't we?) and contrary to any notion of the free and open society you claim to support.
11
Naturally, my comment was addressed at #7:
12
Wow. I can't believe that Starbucks isn't sending their workers to Harvard or to Europe for a year of study! How fucking selfish.
13
Starbucks is a "people based company???" That's why they fire their hungry employees for taking perfectly good, unopened food out of the trash.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…
14
@collectivism_sucks, YOU try to find a better job. I'm college educated, very smart, have excellent employment history and many other "virtues" employers look for. When I had to relocate and find a new job, I found a wonderful job, co-worker/management-wise, but the pay sucks ass, SUCKS ASS, I tell you. It also took me a year to find this job. I haven't been paid this low in over a decade. However, that is all my location has to offer and it is actually the best my location has to offer. New-hires at Starbucks in the same area make the same amount of money as myself working in accounting. So, fuck your "better job" comment and fuck your "deserve poverty" comment to those choosing to work at Starbucks. How the fuck do you think people become managers? The company tends to hire from within, so ya gotta start somewhere. I'm not a huge fan of Starbucks, but no one deserves poverty and who the hell are you to say that someone shouldn't make a career of being a barista at Starbucks? Pay is pretty average for the current economy and they offer flexible scheduling and the ability to become management. Why do I read these comments, twatwaffles like you just piss me off.
15
#1 put it best. If you haven't read their comment, please do.

I'm not a fan of Ansel Herz...at all, as he's the most negative little bitch in all of The Stranger.

What Starbucks is doing is a good thing, Ansel. I know you absolutely HATE any large corporation, but Starbucks is interested in helping their employees, so shut the hell up you little kid. NOTHING is good enough for you. The perfect IS the enemy of the good, and Ansel Herz is the enemy of serious journalism.

16
@14
Just out of curiosity....what was your major in? So many of the people screaming that there aren't any jobs for college graduates I've run into all have majors like "anthropology" or "art history" or "women's studies" (WTF?)
And if you want to be a barista your whole life fine, just don't expect accountant pay while working a barista job. If you want more money than work your way up to management. Nothing wrong with that at all. I'm just mad at the mother with five kids by five different men, working at McDonald's as a drive thru cashier with no motivation to move up to supervisor saying she deserves 15/hour because she can't raise five kids on a drive thru cashier's salary.
My advice to such people: EITHER STOP FUCKING OR USE A CONDOM.
17
@10
It is not receiving money from corporate sponsors that I have issue with, it's the HYPOCRISY that I can't stand.
Just as there was nothing wrong with Ted Haggard sleeping with a man, but it was the hypocrisy of a homophobic, fundamentalist preacher sleeping with a man that angered people, there is nothing wrong with being funded by ads, but an "anti-capitalist" being funded by ad dollars from businesses is hypocrisy.

Ansel, and most people like him, are like homophobic preachers who sleep with men behind closed doors. Just stop being a hypocrite, all of you.
18
@collectivism_sucks
I'm an accountant with an accounting degree and no children. I'm fairly certain you didn't read what I wrote, nor do you remember what you wrote. It doesn't matter if one woman has five kids from five different guys, the pay is the same in my area for a job in accounting or Starbucks and neither are living wages. What you initially wrote has nothing to do with what you state is your actual problem in your second comment. Your rage appears to make you blind.
19
Follow the ownership trail
20
The way this article makes it sound as if The Stranger wont be happy until Starbucks pays for every Starbucks employee to go to any university and study any major. Of course then we need to increase the minimum wage to help those Liberal Arts majors have a "liveable" wage working as a barista at Starbucks - since they cant find a decent paying job being an arts major.

The Stranger throws around the phrase "for profit" like it was a dirty dildo, as if Starbucks should be "for compassion" rather than "for profit".

Here is the deal: The winner of the 15now debate are the unions and socialist PR (public relations). They have changed the dynamic of the talking points so that corporations wish to appear "more compassionate". Case in point is Starbucks appearing on the liberal iconic TV program to offer a watered down benefit to all of its employees. The problem is that mandating "compassion" is stupid. Forcing a collective idea of what "compassion" is upon all of us is actually quite the opposite of compassion.

( Of course Starbucks is anything but compassionate. They are for profit. And this is a marketing tactic. If we confuse compassion with marketing, we are missing the point. )

But dont get me wrong, I agree with collectivism_sucks. Because I believe that the only way you should be able to provide a good or service and still be profitable is by giving people what they want. And giving people what they want is the point, not lip service to some silly rhetoric of what "compassion" is.

Sheesh
21
"We've tried to embrace humanity as a core competency." (Does that sound to anyone else like an admission that capitalism is anti-humanity by default?)

Yes. And it also sounds like empty P.R. bullshit flapping grandly through the air on the hot wind from How. Schu.'s mouth.
22
It's actually more interesting what this says about higher ed than about Starbucks:
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Deal-Wit…
http://tressiemc.com/2014/06/17/lattes-a…
23
"EITHER STOP FUCKING OR USE A CONDOM."

You mean acting Asian/white?

" It doesn't matter if one woman has five kids from five different guys"

Errrr, yes it does matter.
24
@16 You'll struggle to raise 5 kids on $15/hr.

You'll struggle to raise 1 kid in $15/hr.
26
@2 I'm glad your comment is closer to the top. Dick's program is significantly better than this and it's pretty insulting to have to pick a single university. I will assume anyone mentioning it in a positive light is being paid by whatever online college group that owns that 'college'. "First in the nation" to value corporate profits over education maybe but even that's pushing it.
27
once again, we see that when the Gimme-Free-Shit crowd(ansel) is offered some free shit, they still complain about it.

Hey Ansel - WHEN have you EVER held a REAL job?
28
@26" it's pretty insulting to have to pick a single university"

then pay for it yourself, asswipe.
29
@20, the problem is that "for profit" is, precisely, a dirty word in higher education. For-profit "universities" are straight-up full of shit. They are essentially con games designed to siphon money out of the federal government in the form of student loans, which leave their students with no marketable job skills (because their "degrees" are worthless) but tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

If the feds would do the right thing and forbid loans for for-profit schools, these places would all dry up and blow away, and the country would be better off for it. Phoenix University (aka The World's Biggest Spammers) is the worst, but they're all bad. Wal-Mart's program in particular looks like complete and utter bullshit; you'll get a better education drinking sterno in Pioneer Square than at a for-profit online "university" in this country.

Now, I dunno about the Starbucks plan. ASU, while not exactly Oxford, is a real university, and their online program has the same accreditation as the campus version. I'm not sure where Goldrick-Rab is getting "profit venture" from that; I'd like to hear more.

But this is clearly a step in a very controversial direction: the tech libertarian assholes are dead-set on eliminating the modern university as we know it, and creating a brave new world of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), where one professor can teach ten thousand students at once. Futurist educators are always bloviating about these things and how they'll change everything, mostly by putting 90% of college professors on the unemployment line. There are very serious concerns that MOOCs, like for-profit universities (with which they always seem to be intertwined with) are the end of real education and the beginning of a Brave New World where a diploma really is just a piece of paper, and a country where nobody knows anything except how to video their dicks with their Google Glass.
30
@26" it's pretty insulting to have to pick a single university"

I am personally embarrassed to have anything whatsoever in common with the person who cod say this. Much of the world has actual problems to deal with every day and you find it INSULTING that someone is offering to pay for your fucking education?!?!?

Where the fuck did you get the idea that the world owes you something? Seriously, you make us all look bad.
31
Does The Stranger send its office cleaning crew to college? Do they even get paid $15 an hour.
32
I'm with @2 and @26. Starbucks and WalMart are re-Dick-less.
33
What does The Stranger and Tim Keck offer their employees other than a platform to voice reactionary, bomb-throwing articles against "the man"?

How much does Tim Keck & Co. pay their employees? Paid internships perhaps?

How about we see little Ansel Herz attack some of the companies that pay for advertising on The Stranger? Can we expect that sometime? No, I thought not.

34
@ 29 you say "video their dicks with Google Glass" like it's a bad thing?
35
It would be funny if it was similar to the "free" education at my work where you must promise to continue working there for x amount of time or else have to pay back the funds.
36
Pretty sure Walmart is going to require you to be full time, have worked there for at least a year, hold a certain course load, and take the classes they want you to take. It's just a tax write off, but at least this one you can take art classes with.
38
The fact the employees can't chose where they can go to school makes this a sleazier program compared to what Dick's offers. And that it's a for-profit college...jesus, makes me wonder what the school is getting in return?
39
Why should college be free?
40
IT'S NOT FOR-PROFIT. Fuck.

To everyone who hasn't done the research and takes Ansel at face value: Fnarf @29 is correct. ASU is NOT a for-profit university, for Heaven's sake. Even the MSNBC article linked to says so. ASU partners with a company to manage their online version, yes, in the same way that many colleges now use Google for their mail services.

ASU is an accredited university with a decent reputation, as stated by the Starbucks College Plan FAQ and backed up by US News & World Report college rankings. It's not the University of Phoenix, which everyone seems to think. They both have Arizona in their name, that's all. Sheesh. Like Java and JavaScript.

Wal-mart's APE, on the other hand, IS a for-profit university, and they deserve our ridicule.

Everyone's so focused on Starbucks only allowing a single university, but hey, they don't have to offer _anything_. Their old program which gave a scholarship to any university was $1000 a year. Woo. Try to pay for a semester with that.

Here is a more nuanced, researched article, which addresses and includes the concerns mentioned elsewhere, but paints a fair picture of both sides:
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2014/…

41
#39: Because it creates an educated population with skills, and it devalues college degrees enough so that people may opt out for more practical job training--a process that is likely to diversify the workforce. It also reduces debt for college students who will have more money to spend and boost the economy.There are a shit ton of reasons to make college free. But of course we could just play dumb about it like Americans always do with these fake moral/ethical questions.
42
@40: ASU's non-profit designation means very little: http://www.humanosphere.org/podcasts/201…

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