<p>I thought it couldn’t get much worse, but Wal-Mart has joined the higher education bandwagon. </p>
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<p>Meanwhile, the average Wal-Mart retail worker makes $12.00/hour, and the average retail management degree (associate’s) costs around $5,000. In addition, the retail industry has high turnover for obvious reasons (low pay, inflexible hours, few advancement options, etc.)</p>
<p>These “degrees” are worthless outside Wal-Mart. Shame on them!!</p>
<p>^^ Why do you say they’re worthless outside of Wal-Mart? Why are you knocking Wal-Mart for offering this to employees? They’re not forced to to participate. Do you think K-Mart or Target offer a better similar type of benefit?</p>
<p>Some people are going to hate Wal-Mart no matter what it does - cuz their union hacks have told them to.</p>
<p>I dislike Wal-Mart because of how they treat their employees and how they shift the cost of health insurance of their employees onto the states. </p>
<p>No “union hack” had to point that out to me.</p>
<p>Maybe the states just shouldn’t pay for any health insurance then?</p>
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<p>I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your complaint. Would you please clarify?</p>
<p>Thought it was funny that those “grass roots” campaigns against Walmart you hear about are actually being funded by their competition:</p>
<p>[Rivals</a> Secretly Finance Opposition to Wal-Mart - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704875604575280414218878150.html?KEYWORDS=walmartKEYWORDS%3DwalmartKEYWORDS%3DwalmartKEYWORDS%3Dwalmart]Rivals”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704875604575280414218878150.html?KEYWORDS=walmartKEYWORDS%3DwalmartKEYWORDS%3DwalmartKEYWORDS%3Dwalmart)</p>
<p>MUNDELEIN, Ill.—Robert Brownson long believed that his proposed development here, with its 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, was being held hostage by nearby homeowners. </p>
<p>He had seen them protesting at city hall, and they had filed a lawsuit to stop the project.</p>
<p>What he didn’t know was that the locals were getting a lot of help. A grocery chain with nine stores in the area had hired Saint Consulting Group to secretly run the antidevelopment campaign. Saint is a specialist at fighting proposed Wal-Marts, and it uses tactics it describes as “black arts.”</p>
<p>As Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has grown into the largest grocery seller in the U.S., similar battles have played out in hundreds of towns like Mundelein. Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway Inc. and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart, according to hundreds of pages of Saint documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former employees.</p>
<p>Saint has jokingly called its staff the “Wal-Mart killers.” P. Michael Saint, the company’s founder, declines to discuss specific clients or campaigns. When read a partial list of the company’s supermarket clients, he responds that “if those names are true, I would say I was proud that some of the largest, most sophisticated companies were so pleased with our success and discretion that they hired us over the years.”</p>
<p>It seems like your complaint is more towards APU and online education than towards Wal-Mart.</p>
<p>I guess I am in the minority but I like Walmart and shop there. Certain things are definitively cheaper at Walmart. Likely many folks, for a long time I believed all of the negative things Ive read about Walmart. Maybe they were true in the past . but I know several people who have family members that work at our local store and my opinion has changed. </p>
<p>One friends daughter is a full time student unmarried with a 3 y/o. She got pregnant her senior year of hs. She works as a pharmacy tech at Walmart. They have been very accommodating to her school schedule; allowing her to work 30 hours/wk and receive full benefits, including health insurance for her and her son. She says Walmart will hire people like her who may have made a mistake somewhere along the way but deserve a second or even a third chance to change their life around.</p>
<p>I don’t see what the problem is.</p>
<p>"Wal-Mart screened 81 colleges before signing its deal with American Public University. One that talked extensively with the retailer was University of Maryland University College, a 94,000-student state institution that is a national leader in online education. According to University College’s president, Susan C. Aldridge, it was during early discussions that Wal-Mart executives told her the company was considering whether it should buy a college or create its own college.</p>
<p>When asked to confirm that, Ms. Galberth said only that Wal-Mart “brainstormed every possible option for providing our associates with a convenient and affordable way to attend college while working at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club,” which is also owned by Wal-Mart Stores. “We chose to partner with APU to reach this goal. We have no plans to purchase a brick-and-mortar university or enter the online education business,” she said.</p>
<p>The Wal-Mart deal was something of a coming-out party for American Public University. The institution is part of a 70,000-student system that also includes American Military University and that largely enrolls active-duty military personnel. As American Public turned its attention to luring the retail behemoth, it was apparently able to be more flexible than other colleges and willing to “go the extra mile” to accommodate Wal-Mart, said Jeffrey M. Silber, a stock analyst and managing director of BMO Capital Markets. That flexibility included customizing programs. APU has a management degree with courses in retail, and its deans worked with Wal-Mart to add more courses to build a retail concentration, said Wallace E. Boston, the system’s president and chief executive.</p>
<p>It also enticed Wal-Mart with a stable technology platform; tuition prices that don’t vary across state lines, as they do for public colleges; and online degrees in fields that would be attractive to workers, like transportation logistics.</p>
<p>Unlike American Public, Maryland’s University College would not put a deep discount on the table.</p>
<p>Credit for Wal-Mart work was also an issue, Ms. Aldridge said.</p>
<p>“We feel very strongly that any university academic credit that’s given for training needs to be training or experience at the university level,” Ms. Aldridge said. “And we have some very set standards in that regard. And I’m not certain that we would have been able to offer a significant amount of university credit for some of the on-the-job training that was provided there.”</p>
<p>Awarding credit for college-level learning gained outside the classroom is a long-standing practice, one embraced by about 60 percent of higher-education institutions, according to the most recent survey by the Council for Adult And Experiential Learning. A student might translate any number of experiences into credit: job training, military service, hobbies, volunteer service, travel, civic activities."</p>
<p>[Is</a> ‘Wal-Mart U.’ a Good Bargain for Students? - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Wal-Mart-U-a-Good/65933/]Is”>http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Wal-Mart-U-a-Good/65933/)</p>
<p>Why am I against this? Because these “credits” are worthless if you’re not planning to work for Wal-Mart for the rest of your life and the tuition is overpriced for what it’s worth.</p>
<p>The average student pays less than $12,000 to earn an associate’s degree. The whole thing is a cash cow/diploma mill.</p>
<p>How is this degree worth any less than an equivalent degree from anywhere else? A degree isn’t a ‘ticket’ to anywhere - it simply demonstrates some accomplishments and hopefully some knowledge gained. Since you don’t speak for all employers how can you make these statements?</p>
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<p>How much does it cost? $5,000 or $12,000? I’m not trying to be snarky, I honestly don’t know. </p>
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<p>According to the American Public University website, its credits are recognized by the Federal government and the American military. [APUS</a> - Accreditation & Licensure](<a href=“http://www.apus.edu/accreditation-licensure/]APUS”>Accreditation | American Public University System (APUS)) Add in Wal*Mart and it appears to me that 3 of the biggest employers in the country will accept these degrees. Sure, it’s no Ivy sheepskin, but it’s better than nothing and could lead to something more than $12/hour.</p>
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<p>So if Walmart didn’t have this program they would be good, but because they do, they’re terrible? </p>
<p>I also happen to know several Walmart employees who are quite happy - in fact I know of a few mentally challenged people who work there too and they’re making the best of this opportunity.</p>
<p>I’m just very wary of for-profit educational institutions, and particularly nervous about how they have a tendency to prey on low-income students who can’t get any other educational opportunities, and lure them in with promises of upward mobility at incredibly high and not-well-explained costs. They usually end up with massive debt and degrees that don’t get them any further ahead than they were before they signed up for those incredibly expensive student loans.</p>
<p>It’s particularly nerve-wracking that Wal-Mart would form a partnership with one of these for-profit educational institutions, when they’ve already got a bad reputation (whether founded or unfounded) for taking unfair advantage of their employees.</p>
<p>The discount may make it more worthwhile, but the whole idea still makes me nervous, knowing what I’ve learned about for-profit education…</p>
<p>Every case is different; I know someone who went to a for-profit commuter school and acquired some very practical knowledge of PCs and networks and was able to both land a job which required precisely this skill as well as run a one-man PC consulting business. You also have people with degrees from non-profits that gets them nowhere.</p>
<p>On a broader issue, the difference between profits and non-profits is sometimes pictured in very black and white terms which doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. We have a hospital chain that is a non-profit which runs their business in a very ruthless model, the only difference being there are no shareholders. Similarly some of the health insurance companies that get criticized as any are also non-profits. So while not knowing anything about this specific institution that has teamed up with Walmart as to their tendency to prey on their students, if you skim through a very active thread last week on student debts, you can see that non-profits also are quite guilty of saddling their graduates with a lot of debt without salaries to match.</p>
<p>It appears Walmart is giving its employees an option that most of their peers don’t and there’s nothing that prevents an employee from just declining. So what’s so bad about it unless you’re hunting for something to attack W with?</p>
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Hmmm - aren’t there recurring threads on this essentially happening at ‘mainstream’ colleges?</p>
<p>More…
<a href=“http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/03/wal-mart-launches-employee-college-plan/[/url]”>http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/03/wal-mart-launches-employee-college-plan/</a></p>
<p>Given the credit permitted for work experience and the cost/credit hour I don’t know how this translates to the actual cost for an associates or bachelors degree and how that would compare to other similar institutions. I don’t know how it compares to similar benefits, if any, at similar retail employers - Costco, K-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Frys, JC Penney, Sears, etc.</p>
<p>Edit - looks like I cross-posted with Dad<em>of</em>3</p>
<p>I know, but I’d just be wary. How things have trended with Wal-Mart and with for-profit educational endeavors would cause me, if I were a Wal-Mart employee, to look very carefully at what this would really offer me, and I’m not certain that the majority of employees would have the aptitude or past experience to look more closely to see whether or not this is truly a good deal. There are a lot of ways that this could go poorly for the employees if they don’t do their due diligence on this.</p>
<p>It could end up being a fantastic deal, but we don’t have the fine print on this, so we can’t read through it and see it for what it is. All I’m saying is that I’d be nervous, given past trends for both Wal-Mart and for-profit education, and given that the only party that really has anything to lose here is the student. I truly hope that they have the insight transcendent to the experience of the stereotypical Wal-Mart employee to really vet this opportunity before they invest in it, and I hope that the student-employees’ best interests are sincerely at the heart of this deal.</p>
<p>Edit: Statistics for the amount of student debt and the number of lawsuits against for-profit academic institutions for false advertising are pretty staggeringly pessimistic. There are quotas and hard-sell tactics to get students into the doors, in a lot of cases. While traditional colleges do indeed saddle their graduates with some pretty weighty debt in return for their degrees (I married a musician! Believe me, I know…), the for-profit students tend to end up with a lot more debt and a lot less value.</p>
<p>I think the expression “caveat emptor” applies to higher education as much as every other market.</p>
<p>I think Walmart is acting in the best interests of its employees by choosing this vendor.
On-line education is what the employees wanted. By choosing a national vendor, they could
offer classes everywhere, an option not given by community colleges. By making a large commitment to the vendor, they ensured that the quality will be there. Bravo, Walmart!</p>