I’m intrigued by an announcement made at the start of last week that Starbucks is teaming up with Arizona State University to provide free online education to its 135,000 US employees. The opportunity is open to any individual who works at least 20 hours a week, and has the grades and test scores necessary to gain admission to ASU. For employees with at least two years of college credit, full tuition is offered. For others, partial tuition can be claimed. At ASU, students can access one of the largest online degree programmes in the US, with 11,000 students spread across 40 majors. The ultimate target is to teach 100,000 students online.

Criticism of the initiative soon surfaced. On inspection, it turns out that Starbucks will only start to refund tuition costs after at least seven online courses have been completed. Many students may never reach that point, and therefore gain no free education at all. Those who do will have to spend more than $10,000 on course enrolments before they begin to get any money back. Issues of fairness, access and sheer affordability therefore need to be sorted out as the programme beds down. More generally, there are suspicions throughout higher education that online learning is inferior to traditional classroom teaching. For sure it will take time to build confidence in the new methods.

Nevertheless, there is obviously great potential in this pioneering work/study model – a kind of Starbucks University. It goes beyond most corporate programmes by opening access to all employees, and indeed to ex-employees who can continue to claim financial support even after quitting their jobs. It capitalizes on the very great flexibility offered by online learning. It blazes a trail for productive partnerships between global corporations and innovative universities. It must contain lessons for Myanmar.