Schultz: selling coffee while going to college and selling coffee after college?

Starbucks coffee CEO Howard Schultz. Expansion film

Whether it is the title of the old poor scholar, or the modern version of the factory security guard admitted to Tsinghua University, it is all a continuous copy of "Education changes fate." Now, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Coffee, wants to make the story more chicken soup, more inspirational and more jealous.

This week, Starbucks announced that it would spend $250 million on a partnership with Arizona State University to provide its employees with full tuition fees for online courses, giving them the opportunity to earn a bachelor's degree for free. Such generosity makes people feel: do you want to go to college for free? Let's go to Starbucks to sell coffee.

From the perspective of traditional economics, Schultz is quite right. As early as 1979, an economist with the same surname, Theodore Schultz, based on a systematic analysis of the impact of education investment on agricultural productivity and economic development, put forward the theory of human capital investment-through education, let workers master more knowledge and labor skills, so that they can get higher-paying and more valuable jobs in the market, and finally realize the realization of personal value and social and economic growth. Theodore Schultz won the Nobel Prize in economics for this research.

At present, young people around the world are facing the challenge of finding jobs. According to a recent report released by the International Labour Organization (ILO), suffering from the slow global economic recovery, 202 million people around the world are currently unemployed, and the unemployment rate will continue to rise in the next five years, and the number of unemployed is expected to increase by 3 million in 2015 alone.

"Don't worry about promotion and raise, go out and turn left to Starbucks." just as Schultz imagined using such a slogan to attract more young people to join, a heavyweight analysis report of the Brookings Institution led by former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers slapped Schultz in the face.

After comparing the Gini coefficient and the Theil index, which measure American income growth and inter-group disparity between 1979 and 2013, economists are dismayed to find that although in the past 40 years, people with college degrees earn about $20, 000 more a year than workers without higher education, and more than $400000 more over their entire careers, but this change is effective only for people below middle income. On the other hand, it has little impact in the middle and high-income areas.

In other words, Schultz's sending young people with high school degrees who could only work in coffee shops to college can help them have better opportunities for better jobs, thus better conditions for raising children and alleviating the intergenerational transmission of poverty. But if you want to go to the pinnacle of your life to marry Bai Fumei and become an CEO, it is not enough to sell coffee to go to a free college. Therefore, Schultz's seemingly beautiful and noble employee education program is likely to end up with a "don't get confused when you graduate and apply for a job, go out and turn left to Starbucks."

However, Schultz has nothing to lose. Education is indeed an important way to improve employment, but equally indispensable and more important is the government's adjustment of the economic structure and the labour market. As for individuals, it is no longer important whether they go to college while selling coffee, or whether they can only sell coffee when they go to college. Before difficult times, whether it is selling coffee or going to college, as long as it brings you a better life, you have to fight for it. (source: Qilu Evening News)