Starbucks received wonderful publicity for its offer to pay the tuition of thousands of workers who took online courses at Arizona State University.

But there is a catch.

“Any Starbucks employee who works at least 20 hours per week will soon be able to complete his/her junior and senior years of college at Arizona State University (ASU) Online, thanks to a deal between the coffeehouse colossus and the institute of higher learning. But not everyone thinks that the new plan is such a great deal for Starbucks employees.

The Starbucks College Achievement Plan, which replaces an earlier tuition assistance program in the company’s benefits package, was officially unveiled at a public forum in New York’s Times Center. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put in an appearance at the forum during which he told Starbucks employees, “I urge you to take advantage of this.”

A joint statement from Starbucks and ASU hailed the new tuition reimbursement plan as “a powerful, first-of-its-kind program designed to unleash [a] lifetime opportunity for thousands of eligible part-time and full-time U.S. partners (employees).” Under the new plan, employees who complete their freshman and sophomore years at ASU Online would receive a major discount, and the remaining two years would be totally free.

Sounds great, right? Not according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who said she found it “incredibly problematic” that Starbucks has decided to limit its tuition assistance to a single online university.

““ASU Online is a profit venture,” said Goldrick-Rab. “And basically, these two businesses have gotten together and created a monopoly on college ventures for Starbucks employees.”

“Although ASU is a public university, its online wing is definitely a revenue-generating enterprise, helping the university manage its finances in an era of declining state aid. Online courses are taught by ASU professors, but much of the technical and administrative work that goes into managing ASU Online has been handed over to a private company, Pearson.

“In addition to limiting student choices, Goldrick-Rab said she believes it will leave them with a shoddier education. Recent research has suggested that online-only classes may leave low-income students at a disadvantage. Those are precisely the people, said Goldrick-Rab, who are mostly likely to enroll in ASU Online through the Starbucks program.

“These studies indicate that online education not only doesn’t work well for them, but can also propel them backwards,” she said. Students would also be expected to become full-time students, while still working an average 20 hours per week at Starbucks.”

And that is not all. The New York Times reports: that “students could have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, and wait months or years before being reimbursed.”

“That feature of the program was not mentioned in the Starbucks news release announcing the program, or on its publicly accessible web page about the program. But as word of it leaked out, educators and education experts took to the Internet to say that the benefit was less than it seemed, and might even frighten away some potential users.

“Given the upfront cost, it pushes a lot of risk onto the student,” Rachel Fishman, an education policy analyst at the New America Foundation, wrote in a blog post dissecting the program.”

Eduardo Porter, a business columnist for the New York Times, writes enthusiastically about a new and inexpensive way to “skip college.”

He writes:

“This week, AT&T and Udacity, the online education company founded by the Stanford professor and former Google engineering whiz Sebastian Thrun, announced something meant to be very small: the “NanoDegree.”

“At first blush, it doesn’t appear like much. For $200 a month, it is intended to teach anyone with a mastery of high school math the kind of basic programming skills needed to qualify for an entry-level position at AT&T as a data analyst, iOS applications designer or the like.

“Yet this most basic of efforts may offer more than simply adding an online twist to vocational training. It may finally offer a reasonable shot at harnessing the web to provide effective schooling to the many young Americans for whom college has become a distant, unaffordable dream.”

“Intriguingly, it suggests that the best route to democratizing higher education may require taking it out of college.

“We are trying to widen the pipeline,” said Charlene Lake, an AT&T spokeswoman. “This is designed by business for the specific skills that are needed in business.”

“Mr. Thrun sounded more ambitious about the ultimate goal: “It is like a university,” he told me, “built by industry.”

Correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds very much like vocational training, not college.

Porter rightly says that college is out of reach for many young people, and he is right. One of the reasons it is out of reach is that many states are shifting the financial burden from the public to the student. That’s short-sighted. Surely higher education should be available to many more young people, and the way to make it more affordable is to reduce the cost by government subsidies.

Job training is not enough. The doors to higher education should be open to all who have the will and the ability to pursue it, without regard to their income.

Once upon a time, community colleges were free. Once upon a time, states subsidized public higher education to keep costs low.

Here is a book that argues that public higher education should be free. What a dream. Our society invests our treasure elsewhere.