Starbucks Just Announced They’ll Offer All Veteran Employees Free College For Their Spouse Or Child

Over the weekend, social media exploded with “outrage” over the coffee chain’s minimalistic red holiday cups. “War on Christmas”-types took the lack of Christmas iconography like snowflakes and Santa Claus extremely personally. Facebook timelines were flooded with a rant from evangelical Christian pundit Joshua Feuerstein , who raged in a video about the company taking “Christ and Christmas off of their brand new cups.”

While people were being outraged over nothing, Starbucks quietly announced a badass new benefit for it’s employees. The company is already offering a full ride for employees who work more than 20 hours a week through online courses at Arizona State. They’ll now extend that benefit to the children and spouses of employees who are veterans. This means that the children of veterans employed at Starbucks are eligible to receive a 100% tuition-free college education via ASU. Via Forbes:

Just in time for Veterans Day: Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks is announcing today that it will now extend a 100% tuition-free four-year college benefit to the spouse or child of every U.S. veteran or active military reservist employed 20 or more hours a week.

This new benefit, whose zero-tuition price point results from a 42-58 partnership between ASU and Starbucks, will be an additional benefit atop the previously-announced college benefit (also four years, 100% tuition free) that Starbucks extends to every employee who works 20 hours per week or more, which is offered through the online campus of Arizona State University (ASU), an accredited (and generally well-respected) institution, in an approach that has been lauded by the leadership of the U.S. Department of Education.

Starbucks will also now be paying for up to 80 hours per year for service obligations of employees who are active duty or reservists in the U.S. Armed Forces or National Guard.

Starbucks currently employs over 5,500 veterans and military spouses and aims to hire 10,000 vets nationwide by 2018. Kudos to a Bro move.

Now chill with the phony cup outrage, for all of America’s sanity.

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Brandon Wenerd is BroBible's publisher, writing on this site since 2009. He writes about sports, music, men's fashion, outdoor gear, traveling, skiing, and epic adventures. Based in Los Angeles, he also enjoys interviewing athletes and entertainers. Proud Penn State alum, former New Yorker. Email: brandon@brobible.com