The giant supermarket has announced that it is going to be partnering with the American Public University to give its employees academic credits.
Wal-Mart considered 81 colleges for screening from which to choose for the program. In the search the supermarket’s governing body looked for online universities as well as traditional colleges, but ¾ of the workers preferred online studies instead of taking classes in real. This was revealed by a survey.
Due to the partnership employees of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club could earn college credit by either their experience on the job, participating in on-job trainings or getting online classes at a reduced tuition rate.
Wal-Mart has also been generous enough to spend $50 million to pay for the books and tuition apart from the discounted rate over the next 3 years. The resulting rate per undergraduate credit hour after all discounts are applied would be around $212 and for graduate credit hour it would be near $255.
The idea of providing the employees such valuable benefits came from the concept of growing talent within the company instead of hiring new, more educated employees. By doing this Wal-Mart is actually saving the hiring cost and retaining experienced staff for higher posts in the future.
According to one of the officials at Wal-Mart, if even 10% employees succeed getting degrees through this program, it would be like three times the number of graduates of Ohio State.