Some of the nation’s largest employers — like Walmart, McDonald’s and Jiffy Lube — are broaching a new frontier: convincing colleges to give credits to retail and fast-food workers for what they learn on the job, counting toward a degree. Educators hope this brings more students into the fold, expanding access to education and allowing more people to achieve better-paying, more-secure careers with less debt and fewer years of juggling work and study. Behind the scenes, executives paint a grander transformation of hiring, a world where your resume will rely less on titles or diplomas and act more like a passport of skills you’ve proven you have. Learn more about how it works 👇
McDonalds already has tuition assistance, as do many other chains. I think the life skills that you would learn at McDonalds or any other similar job are outside the purview of college material. Life skills and scholarly credentials are totally separate realms and should be recognized as such.
Carl Karasti
2w
Educational institutions would bear the responsibility (costs, accountability) for ensuring that the credits awarded would be meaningful representations of knowledge, understanding and ability gained, yet they would likely have minimal control over what might actually be learned and what skills would be gained on the job. Big business is likely to try to take advantage of such a situation by avoiding the hiring process while gaining employees and while probably writing off training and supervision costs in order to increase their bottom lines. And big businesses are known for cutting corners in order to increase their bottom lines, which suggests that they might try to get away with low quality training and with minimal monitoring of performance and learning and dubious accountability. This may be why businesses are promoting this "opportunity." In order to create a worthy program, businesses would need to have well-qualified "teachers" as employees, which would be an added expense that they would be likely to skimp on in order to maintain their bottom line profits, which would not bode well for quality training programs. And who would be responsible for making sure that the industry "teachers" are adequately qualified to teach?
April Bayne
2w
A closer collaboration between business and education institutions would be helpful. perhaps a combination of internship type credits combined with earning tuition for skill building courses that would benefit the business. I know companies complain that employees move on but if more companies did this it wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe some scholarship money could be earned by enrolling in the program.
Important that I read the article before judgment. It seems just like a role reversal where instead of a student going out and looking for an internship, McDonald's and Wal-Mart are proactive in recognizing an internship experience for their employees. And the safeguards are very likely to be in place. I've worked on accreditation committees for higher education. Companies that work with colleges have to meet specific curriculum requirements and colleges in turn have to prove to their accrediting bodies that they are only awarding credit for approved curriculum. And the credit is not for flipping burgers and stocking shelves. It is for corporate training programs and certifications for corporate leadership and management training that happens to be attended by employees who have experienced the hard work of flipping burgers and stocking shelves. Hopefully it will be a very good thing for hard working students.
Jason Wright
2w
This has always been done with the military and their training, education, and skills learned on the job. A similar set up with private employers would be a fantastic way to help people earn their degrees faster and with less debt. Skills and knowledge gained in the job in real world settings is more valuable than book knowledge of how things “should” work. However, this would likely require very standardized education, training, and SOPs across all locations for a given company, which could be difficult for companies like McDonald’s who have a lot of franchised locations. This standardization, though, would give their customers a more consistent experience with the brand and would make the experience of a an associate who transfers (laterally or for promotion) more streamlined and easier to navigate.
Yeah, someone already does this... the university of pheonix... let's all let disadvantaged workers earn a meaningless degree from a meaningless university instead of paying livable wages.
This is laughable; especially when you consider that McDonald’s food quality has diminished; and the customer service is terrible — nowhere near what it was over 40 years ago. As for Walmart, do customers qualify as they’re mostly checking out their own purchases in the self-service registers? Jiffy Lube?! What other employers are “broaching” this new concept…? 🙄 🤦♂️ 😑
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2wThis is concerning to me. I love the idea of college credit for work, but what credit are we talking about? Is it going to be something that actually counts towards a meaningful degree or something that just falls into the extras that you hope to use? We can plug almost anything into a Liberal Arts or Business Arts degree, but most of those fall into the non-meaningful category. Are these credits going to be found in Accounting, Engineering, Business Analytics, Economics, and other degrees that have application in real jobs? If not, sounds like this is just a sales tactic for the companies using them to justify lower wages to hopeful people.