As student loan debt reaches 1.8 trillion and borrowers prepare to resume repayments in October, the cost of education is weighing heavily on many Americans.

In a move to attract and retain workers, some companies have started offering tuition reimbursement programs to employees. Amazon, Walmart, and Chipotle all have such programs, and in 2022, around 48% of employers offered some kind of undergraduate or graduate assistance as a benefit, according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2022 benefits survey.  

Waste Management, a waste materials and disposal company that does business as WM, offers free educational programs to employees and dependents through its learning and development initiative. In 2021, the company rolled out its Your Tomorrow program, a partnership with education startup Guild, offering benefits-eligible employees and their dependents access to education programs to complete a high school, undergraduate, or graduate degree. It also gives employees access to business certificate programs. WM pays for the tuition, books, and other fees for more than 170 of those programs, and contributes up to $12,000 annually for more than 40 master’s programs for employees only. 

Through the program, employees have access to online courses offered by select colleges and universities. Some of the schools in WM’s education catalog include Purdue University, Southern New Hampshire University, Cornell, Spelman, Morehouse, the University of Arizona, and the University of Massachusetts.

In the two years since the program began, over 2,000 of nearly 50,000 full-time WM employees have enrolled, according to Kelly Rooney, WM’s chief human resources and diversity and inclusion officer. More than 500 of their dependents have also enrolled in the program. Rooney sat down with Fortune to discuss WM’s Your Tomorrow program.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Fortune: What exactly does the Your Tomorrow program entail?

Kelly Rooney: It allows folks to choose their own adventure. There’s high school completion programs, because we knew that there were some folks who haven’t had the opportunity to get their high school diploma. There are bachelor’s degree programs, master’s programs, certificate programs, folks can take a one-off course if that’s just something they’re interested in. It really does allow people to chart their own path. And we’ve had folks start their bachelor’s degree with the intent of using our Your Tomorrow program to finish their entire degree program.  

What has WM learned in the two years the Your Tomorrow program has been in place? What has worked well, and what have you retooled?

What we’ve learned is that the more we promote it, the more people enroll. That’s a really important aspect. Because simply having it in your benefits offering isn’t enough. Folks really have to understand the value proposition associated with it. When we really started getting to a regular cadence of messaging, we saw enrollment continue to climb. 

The catalog that you choose is important. We’ve made some evolutions in the courses or programs that are selected. We widened the catalog a little bit more based on things that folks were asking us for. That’s hard to gauge until people get in and they’re looking for something specific and say, “Hey, why don’t you offer a course on hydrogeology?” And then we can go back to our provider [Guild] and say, “Hey, we need some wider options.” 

But by and large, it was a no-regrets move for us. There hasn’t been anything that we looked at and said, “Man, we really should have done something vastly different.”

What impact has the Your Tomorrow program had on WM’s workforce in areas like employee satisfaction or retention?

Our employees who are students enrolled in the program are 60% less likely to leave WM than their non-enrolled peers. Our students are 3.3 times more likely to receive a promotion, and the employees who have at least one dependent enrolled in the program are 88% less likely to leave WM. Talk about a strong value proposition. It’s still early innings, but this is pretty consistent.

What advice or insight do you want to share with other HR leaders on implementing similar benefits at their respective organizations?

First, I would say that in the past few years, there have been a lot of providers who’ve come to market with different offerings in this space. You’ve seen really big brands come out and say they’re supporting education benefits for their employees. Anybody who’s looking to do this should look at all of the options out in the marketplace, because there’s a lot more now than there were even five years ago.

Secondly…this is a really important investment that pays off for folks. The way we looked at it, and I would encourage others to think about this, if we don’t enable and empower it, someone else will. And we want to partner with our folks to really accelerate their career development in ways that are satisfying to them, and providing this external offering is a really meaningful and powerful way to do that.

Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion

Reporter's Notebook

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The oldest members of Gen X are just about ready to start retiring, but they’re still paying off their student loans. That generation saw the phase out of pensions in lieu of 401(k)s, while also catching the upswell in higher education costs that began in the 1980s. Around 55% of them don’t think they’re financially prepared for retirement. 

“Retirement is theoretical, until it’s not,” Christian Mitchell, chief customer officer at Northwestern Mutual, told the New York Times.

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