Amazon To Pay Full College Tuition Of Hourly Workers

SEATTLE, WA — Amazon announced Thursday plans to expand the education and skills training benefits it offers to its U.S. employees with a total investment of $1.2 billion by 2025.

Through its Career Choice program, the Seattle-based company said it will fund full college tuition, as well as high school diplomas, GEDs, and English as a second language (ESL) proficiency certifications for its front-line employees—including those who have been at the company for just three months. The program will launch in January.

The company said it plans to pay employees’ tuition and fees in advance rather than offering reimbursement after coursework completion, ensuring that workers don’t need existing funds to start accessing the education options they want.

Amazon will also add three new education programs to provide employees with the opportunity to learn skills within data center maintenance and technology, IT, and user experience and research design.

“Amazon is now the largest job creator in the U.S., and we know that investing in free skills training for our teams can have a huge impact for hundreds of thousands of families across the country. We launched Career Choice almost ten years ago to help remove the biggest barriers to continuing education—time and money—and we are now expanding it even further to pay full tuition and add several new fields of study,” said Dave Clark, CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon.

According to Amazon, all 750,000 U.S. hourly employees are eligible to participate in Career Choice 90 days after starting at Amazon. This makes all 400,000 employees who joined the company since the start of the pandemic eligible to access Amazon-funded education opportunities.

Front-line employees will have access to annual funds for education as long as they remain at the company, with no limit to the number of years they can benefit, the company explained.