Starbucks and Arizona State University are collaborating to help cafe workers get college degrees. Is this a model for helping more Americans reach the middle class?
This cover story in the May issue of The Atlantic looks at the initial phase in a grand experiment by Starbucks: The company is providing financial support to employees who are trying to earn a bachelor's degree through online courses offered by Arizona State University.
A linchpin of the program is the counseling that is being offered to the employees as they try to navigate their way through college. A firm was retained to provide this service, after its effectiveness was documented in a study, published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, by Eric Bettinger and Rachel Baker of Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Here's what the Atlantic article's author, Amanda Ripley, had to say about the research:
Unlike so many other education reforms, coaching has been shown to have significant, measurable effects on student results. In a 2011 study, two Stanford University researchers conducted a randomized, controlled study of the performance of 13,555 students in eight colleges of varying degrees of selectivity. One group of students received coaching from InsideTrack, and a second group did not. After six months, the students in the coached group were five percentage points more likely to still be enrolled. The effects lingered for at least a year after the coaching ended. Five percentage points might seem small, but compared with the results of other, more expensive efforts to increase retention, it is impressive.
Read the full cover story by Ripley, whose latest book, The Smartest Kids in the World, is a New York Times bestseller.
