Q & A Table of Contents
Employers and Tuition Bills
From: Company-sponsored MBA Student,
Silicon Valley, California
Question:I have completed 90% of a Master's Degree with my current employer. I have successfully been "processed" through 2 interview cycles for a position at another company lasting 7 hours. An offer is forthcoming next week.
My current employer requires that I stay with them for a total of 1 year after I receive my Master's degree. If I do not, I am obligated to pay back my current employer for classes taken to date.
My question is how do I get my future employer to pay the tuition bill that will be due when I leave my current employer? The amount is estimated to be about $12K.
Response: Thanks for presenting a genuinely challenging question.
Obviously, since you and your present employer have an agreement, you do indeed have an obligation to stay or pay. The question is how to deal with who does the paying:
One of the questions is whether your new job will offer a sufficiently increased rate of pay to enable you to cover the cost yourself. Perhaps your current employer will allow you to pay off your 'student loan' at the same rate they paid tuition. You may want to negotiate with them ahead of time unless revealing your imminent departure would cause you trouble.
You can ask your next employer how much s/he values your educational progress as one of the attributes that will lead to your hiring. It may be they are prepared to pay off all the tuition as a hiring bonus. Or possibly they would be willing to share the payment with you, so you could negotiate who pays what percentage.
Is there a chance the new employer's conditions would include a willingness to pay all or part of the tuition in return for your commitment to work for a certain period of time, to achieve defined levels of productivity, to reach specified business goals.
One of the issues you should investigate is, since the $12,000 is your personal debt to your current employer, if your new employer pays any part of it, that may be taxable to you as income.
You should investigate your new employer's policy regarding tuition for its other employees. It could be risky to ask for something they've never done before. On the other hand, if it is standard operating procedure, that would indicate their mindset.
You want to ask why it is in your new employer's interest to offer you this assistance. What do they have to gain by paying your debt? If they're excited by the idea of 'grabbing you from the competition', this may simply be a small price to pay for getting you on board.
These ideas do not exhaust the possibilities. Hopefully they will help set your own creative juices in motion to help you come up with still more options to consider.
Please feel free to let me know if you need more thoughts. Given that things could come to a head next week, I didn't want to take to long to get back to you.
Good luck and good negotiating, Steve.
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