text: Back when Starbucks announced the program, the company put out a powerful video featuring a handful of its employees. It documented emotional phone calls in which the workers told their mothers that Starbucks was going to pay for college. By the time the fall semester started, though, only one of those featured employees had actually enrolled. Some were waiting for transcripts, and others had decided the timing wasn’t right.
  Starbucks expects more people to apply as they learn that the benefit is real. “People have been looking for the catch,” Lacey All, the director of strategic talent initiatives at Starbucks, told me. The company has sent out thousands of inspirational e-mails, tweets, and other messages to reassure employees, but skepticism lingers. “We’ve had to do a lot of work,” All added, “to say ‘This is our investment in you. Whether you choose to stay [with the company] or go, you’re going to be better for it. And Starbucks is going to be better for it.’ ”
  Understandably, many Starbucks employees wonder what’s in it for the company. Schultz has insisted the decision was largely driven by a sense of social justice. “We are employing over 100,000 young people in America, and the majority of them do not have a college degree,” he said when announcing the program. “We can’t be a bystander, and we can’t wait for Washington, and I strongly believe that businesses and business leaders must do more for their people and more for the communities they serve.” He readily acknowledges that the new benefit will help Starbucks’s bottom line. “You have to link long-term value for shareholders,” he told me, “with long-term value for employees.” Starbucks already has its pick of employees, hiring just 4 percent of applicants each year. Like many retail businesses, the company’s problem is turnover. In its first two decades under Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks attracted and retained talent partly by offering unusually generous health insurance and stock options to employees, including ones who worked part-time. But those benefits have become less revolutionary, Schultz said, noting that many Americans have now gained access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. The college plan, in combination with a January 2015 pay raise for all baristas and shift supervisors, was designed to keep the company attractive to young employees. Starbucks pays more than the minimum wage in each state, and the company recently revised its scheduling software to ensure that managers can give employees their schedules at least one week in advance and never ask them to work back-to-back closing and opening shifts (a practice baristas refer to as “clopening”).
  “We have set up incredibly complex universities with rules that most ofthe faculty have trouble figuring out,” Renick said. “Then we hand students a course catalog and say ‘Find your way.’ ”
  Half of the Starbucks students received federal Pell grants, a good indicator that they came from families in the bottom 40 percent of the nation’s income distribution. And half took out loans—a similar proportion to Arizona State’s entire online student population. But largely because Arizona State was subsidizing their tuition, Starbucks students’ loans averaged only $4,216, an amount 40 percent lower than the average for the rest of the online student body. In any case, the loans were temporary for the 70 percent of Starbucks students who had at least two years’ worth of credits, because they would be fully reimbursed through their paychecks for every class they took at Arizona State. (If they left Starbucks before reimbursement kicked in, they would be responsible for repaying their loans.)
  There is a tension between making college accessible and making graduation likely. Most colleges have seen no downside to erring on the side of accessibility and letting millions drop out without a degree. For Starbucks and Arizona State, however, a high dropout rate would be a PR fiasco. The right balance is elusive. “We’re learning as we’re going,” Schultz told me.
  The week before classes began, Alicea Thomas, the barista in Southern California, had her laptop stolen. The keyboard had stopped working, so she’d given it to a friend who supposedly knew someone who knew how to fix things. Then her friend disappeared. “He changed his cellphone number and blocked me out on social media,” she told me. She was irate. How could she be an online student without a computer? The laptop, a MacBook Pro, would cost $1,500 to replace—money that Thomas didn’t have. She was earning $11.64 an hour as a Starbucks shift supervisor. “I don’t get paid well for what I do,” she said.
  Many college students today have very little room for error. They don’t live on campus; they attend school online or at a community college. They work full-time and have limited cash. When things go wrong, even small things, a spiral of problems can ensue that ends up causing them to abandon school, the one part of their lives that feels optional. But with a little support—just one or two people in their corner—these same students can prove extremely resilient. “We know if you surround any student with love and attention and good coaching and mentorship, they will succeed,” Daniel Greenstein, who directs college-completion initiatives at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told me. Over time, Greenstein has become more and more convinced that data-driven, student-centered university cultures can reverse the college-dropout trends. “The research tells us that what really matters for low-income and first-generation students,” he said, “is that you put your arms around them.”
  Besides the counseling support, Arizona State also created a special one-week, noncredit orientation class required for all Starbucks students. The course, which I took, involves time-management exercises and inspirational videos, and teaches students basic IT skills to help them cope with the technical glitches that invariably accompany online learning. Much of the content was taken from other places. Like a lot of college classes, it could have been faster-paced and more engaging, but courses like this have been shown to help students succeed in college, and most of the Starbucks students gave it positive reviews in the post-class survey.
  After Thomas’s computer was stolen, she dropped out of her orientation class. But then she did something crucial. She reached out to her academic adviser at Arizona State, who got her signed up for another orientation class happening later that month and encouraged her to find a way to get online.
  That’s when Thomas began taking her classes on her iPhone. She was amazed at how much she could do on the device. After work, she’d take it to Applebee’s, get a margarita, and start doing her reading and tapping out her discussion posts. Problems arose only when she needed a webcam to take the remotely proctored quizzes. In those cases, she usually borrowed a computer from a relative.