College loans to work at your job? Walmart, McDonald’s are trying it: NPR

When Walmart stopped requiring college degrees for most of its corporate jobs last year, the company faced three profound truths about work and education:

A college degree is only a proxy for what someone knows, and not always a perfect one. A diploma high cost puts many people off. For industries dominated by workers without degrees, cultivating future talent requires a different playbook.

Some of the nation’s largest employers, including Walmart and McDonald’s, are now opening a new frontier in higher education: persuading colleges to give retail and fast-food workers credit for what they learn in job, counting toward a degree.

Behind the scenes, executives often paint a grander transformation of employment, a world where your resume will rely less on titles or degrees and act more as a passport to the skills you’ve proven to have.

Right now, companies and educators are starting to skimp on just one of the first steps: figuring out how much credit a college job skill is worth.

Get Walmart training credit

Something unusual happened to Bonnie Boop one semester.

She had gone back to college in her late 40s using Walmart’s tuition assistance program after joining the company as a part-time stockist. In her younger years, she had earned two associate’s degrees, so her children joked that she might as well say she had gone to school for four years. But for him, it wasn’t the same.

“Bachelor’s degrees tend to open more doors,” says Boop. Plus, she says, she insisted on “the principle of it all.”

At Walmart, Boop stocked the health and beauty aisles in the evenings after another day’s work. Later, she went full-time and was promoted to supervise others. This required new training at the Walmart Academy: short, intensive courses in leadership, financial decision-making and workforce planning.

Then one day, while looking into Boop’s upcoming business operations class at Southern New Hampshire University, which Boop attended online from Alabama, her advisor found records showing she had already taken the course.

“But I didn’t,” says Boop. “And she said, ‘Yeah, you got credit from Walmart Academy.’ And I said, what?”

Through corporate training and certificates that convert to college credit, Walmart Academy aims to get workers halfway to a college degree, the organization’s chief told NPR. Boop had done several such programs, which let him skip two college courses.

According to her degree, “that would be two semesters worth,” says Boop. “I was like, wow!”

Studying while also holding down a job meant staying up late after her 11pm shift and keeping a meticulous schedule of major school projects to do on her days off. After 2 1/2 years of that, accelerated by her associate’s degree, Boop saw her picture slide across the screen at virtual graduation in December.

Wearing her cap and gown, she posed for a photo with her new degree: a Bachelor of Science in business administration with a concentration in industrial organizational psychology. Today, Boop is the “main people” of her store, overseeing more than 200 workers.

What about corporations?

Many US universities have long offered corporate training credits from companies such as Google, IBM or Microsoft. For retail and fast food jobs, the process is just beginning.

McDonald’s is working with several community colleges to build a pathway for converting job skills, such as safe food handling or customer service, into credit for degrees in culinary arts, hospitality or insurance. Walmart has over a dozen short-form certificates and 25 training courses — in technology, leadership, digital operations — that translate into credit at partner universities. Car service chain Jiffy Lube also has its own college credit program.

“For adults who feel like they’re not college material, what we’re able to do is say, ‘You are. And you’re already doing college-level work,’ says Amber Garrison Duncan, who runs the nonprofit Competency-Based Education Network, which connects employers and higher education institutions.

Educators hope this will bring more students into the fold – widening 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.

For companies that provide tuition assistance to employees, the idea that job skills should count toward college credit makes financial sense: It means a student spends less time in school and doesn’t have to pay for the classes they’ll take. teach them something they already know.

And paying for tuition can attract workers in a competitive job market and keep them longer, slowing turnover, saving money on recruiting and training, and cultivating greater employer loyalty.

Executives at McDonald’s and Amazon say that’s exactly their motivation, noting that many people use their jobs as stepping stones to elsewhere. Walmart executives differ, saying their goal is to build a pipeline of front-line talent to open positions within the company.

The US military paved the way, but it’s not the same

Counting existing knowledge towards a degree is not a radical idea. Many high school students get a head start on college with credit for AP, or “advanced placement,” classes. Many colleges also offer “credit for prior learning” that allows students to skip foreign language classes if they’re already fluent — or test out of courses through exams or special assessments.

The US military took the idea further in recent decades. She worked with the American Council on Education to build a comprehensive database of how its jobs and training programs translate into college credit.

“There is no rule about what colleges and universities must accept,” says ACE’s Derrick Anderson. “But they can look at the person’s military record … and figure out how much credit they want to give.”

That and other educational support made the military “a powerful engine of socioeconomic mobility,” Anderson says. His group’s database of recommended loans now includes work experience beyond the military: government, nonprofits, internships.

“What I see working with employers, higher education and workforce organizations is a growing understanding that work and learning have been silos in the past and cannot be silos in the future,” says Haley Glover, director of the Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America. initiative.

What about skills acquired simply by working?

Right now, most college credit for work experience focuses on “prior learning” that is taught in a classroom—standardized, structured, and measurable enough to fit rigid criteria—such as training or certification programs.

Figuring out how to map skills to work otherwise acquired is the big step.

“It’s a complex thing,” Glover says. “It requires an employer to be very rigorous about how they’re coding and evaluating, and that’s a capacity that many employers don’t have. It also requires institutions of learning to be very open and progressive.”

Historically, some colleges have allowed students to submit a portfolio, diligently documenting learning on and off the job.

McDonald’s pilot program is looking at how this might work for restaurant workers. Some schools offer a special course, for example, specifically for compiling a portfolio of work skills.

But expanding this system into the retail and foodservice universe would require an army of academics willing to conduct individual reviews. This is an extraordinary time, and professors are often reluctant to commit—especially if it means they would lose a potential student.

“This is definitely a process that disrupts what traditional higher education is used to, in terms of seat time — credit for sitting in a classroom and doing assignments,” says Brianne McDonough at the workforce development nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “It’s a big difference.”

Then, there are more fundamental challenges. Many workers simply don’t know about their employers’ education offerings or struggle to navigate application bureaucracies. They often get some leeway to balance their work and study hours.

“Tragically shocking” was how Anderson described the small portion of workers taking advantage of corporate college benefits.

That’s partly why employment and education officials are talking about a “skills-first approach” to higher education — a future of short-form certificates and credentials that carry the same weight as college degrees.

“This is a problem that many companies are trying to solve,” says Lorraine Stomski, who directs Walmart’s learning and leadership programs. “What are the rules of the future?”