Walmart To Aid Employees To Get College Educations

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 4, 4:44AM EDT

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Walmart (NYSE: WMT) plans to help 1.4 million of its US workers to get a higher education. The company announced that “Walmart’s Lifelong Learning Program will make it more convenient and more affordable for our associates to attend college while also working at the company.”

The program will be done through a partnership with American Public University, an online learning company.The new offering could have a significant impact on the education level of Walmart workers. Associates, as employees are known at the retailer, could receive up to 45 percent of the credits required for an Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree at American Public University based on what they have learned in their career at Walmart. As much as 15% of an “associate’s” tuition will be covered.

American Public University describes itself as a “quality higher education with more than 100 affordable, online degrees and certificates.” The school was started as the American Military University in 1991 by a former Marine Corps officer and instructor James P. Etter.

The news may pressure other large retailers to offer similar programs to their employees or risk the charge that they have less interest in their workers’ futures than Walmart. If the education aid for workers extends to companies such as Target (NYSE: TGT) and Home Depot (NYSE: HD), the online education industry would get an unprecedented windfall.

It may take several months to know how many Walmart workers enroll in APU courses, but the project could help improve the image of the world’s largest retailer which has been accused for years as being “employee unfriendly”, especially due to its efforts to keep unions out of its stores. And, there is that class action suit over sexual discrimination that covers more than one million women. Walmart can use all the good PR it can get. It motives may not be entirely pure, but to its workers, that may not matter.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.