Earlier this week, Walmart announced it will offer students free SAT prep and expand its $1-a-day college tuition program in a bid to recruit new employees.
Although Walmart’s programs do have restrictions, they can be a good deal for young workers — and they also highlight how far Walmart and other employers will go to recruit young workers in a tight market.
With unemployment levels in the US at their lowest point in decades, retailers like Walmart — with 1.5m employees, the largest private employer in the US — sometimes struggle to fill job openings because applicants have so many other options.
Just 25k of Walmart’s 1.5m workers — or 1.7% — are in high school, putting the company’s number of young workers well below the industry average and inspiring the company to offer incentive programs.
Walmart launched its tuition program last year in partnership with 3 colleges that offered degrees in business and supply chain management.
Now, Walmart is expanding the program to 6 colleges and several more degrees. So far, Walmart has accepted 7.5k employees into the program, but it expects 60k to go through the program in the next 4 years.
Since most employees take courses online and Walmart gets the educational equivalent of a bulk discount, the program pays off: Similar education programs have delivered returns on investment of 129%.
Other large employers have also turned to the expensive higher education to find employees: McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Chick-fil-A all offer similar tuition programs.