Walmart is the largest private employer in the United States, so its human resources policies are always big news with national implications. If headlines this week like “Walmart’s perk for workers: Go to college for $1 a day” (CNN) or “Walmart to offer employees a college education for $1 a day” (Washington Post) sound too good to be true, that’s because they largely are. The benefit is real, but it is much more restrictive than those headlines suggest. It’s essentially a bulk purchasing discount for a narrow range of online college courses. It’s also a telling benefit on a number of levels. The labor market is getting stronger, and employers are needing to think harder about how to invest in recruiting and retaining employees. But the old-fashioned strategy of paying more continues to be something corporate America resists, in part out of habit and in part because offering higher wages is a little more complicated than it looks. Companies like Walmart are, in essence, trying to get creative with their compensation packages in hopes of narrowly targeting the money they expend on the core goal of recruiting and retaining desirable workers. The question is whether policymakers will keep unemployment low long enough to break through the wall of resistance to across-the-board pay hikes and force big companies to finally just raise pay. Walmart’s actual tuition plan, explained. The Walmart program is limited to online degree programs offered by three schools — the University of Florida, Brandman University, and Bellevue University — and specifically focused on bachelor’s or associate degrees in either business or supply chain management. You won’t, in other words, be able to do part-time shifts at Walmart to “pay your way through college” in the traditional sense. But qualifying Walmart employees (including both full-time and part-time workers who’ve been with the company for 90 days) will get discounted tuition, books, and access to a coach who will help them decide on an appropriate program and shepherd them through the application process. It’s a nice opportunity for Walmart employees to gain a chance at upward mobility off the retail floor, and that’s likely the point. Unlike higher cash wages (which of course can be used for online college tuition as well as rent, gasoline, movie tickets, medical expenses, etc.), the tuition benefit is likely to be disproportionately appealing to people who are on the more ambitious end of the distribution. It’s an effort, in other words, to make Walmart more attractive specifically to the most appealing set of potential workers, a strategy other companies have pursued in recent years. Many large employers are trying tuition benefits. Modest tuition programs have long been a staple of large employer benefits packages largely because of favorable tax treatment. The IRS allows employers to give employees several thousand dollars’ worth of tuition benefits tax-free, which makes establishing a program something of a no-brainer for most companies big enough to be employing a large back-office staff anyway. But four years ago, Starbucks blazed the trail of offering a much more ambitious reimbursement program that essentially offered taxable tuition subsidies rather than taxable wage increases.
