Starbucks is sending 1,000 employees to college next week. Those employees will be the first wave of workers who will get online classes paid for by the company at Arizona State University. 

The benefit program, which was announced in June, works out to as much as $15,000 a year for each of them. Employees are not required to stay with the company after receiving degrees because Starbucks sees the college opportunity as an investment and as a  recruiting tool. Starbucks says about 8,000 of the job applications received since the program's announcement mentioned the program as the reason they applied.

Seventy percent of Starbucks' 135,000 workers don't have college degrees.