GB700 Unit 9 Problem Statement Draft Example

Unsettled in Print, Costly in Practice: A Unit 9 Problem Statement Draft on Prepaid Degrees and Frontline Turnover

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB700: Doctoral Studies in Business

Unit 9 Problem Statement Draft

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The candidate, the bank and every figure are composite and illustrative; the studies and data sources cited are real.

General Business Problem

Employers in banking, retail and logistics have expanded education benefits, including programs that cover tuition up front for hourly staff, partly to hold on to frontline employees (Cappelli, 2004). Evidence that these programs retain employees after graduation is limited and mixed, and some evidence suggests that graduates become more likely to leave unless they are promoted (Benson et al., 2004).

Specific Business Problem

Some regional banks offering prepaid degree programs lack evidence on whether frontline graduates stay, and under what conditions. At the candidate's bank, a composite regional institution with about 4,800 employees, annual turnover among tellers and operations staff is about 38 percent, and the bank spends about $5,600 to recruit and train each replacement. Among the 64 frontline employees who completed degrees through the bank's existing reimbursement program over the past five years, 23, about 36 percent, resigned within two years of graduating, most within the first year. The bank is considering a much larger prepaid program without knowing whether it will retain graduates or prepare them to leave.

The First Version, and Why It Failed

The first version of the problem read: "Tuition assistance programs may not reduce turnover." It failed both tests. In print, the question is partly settled: refereed studies already show lower turnover among participants during enrollment, so a study asking whether programs reduce turnover in general would repeat known findings. In practice, the question was too broad to inform the bank's decision, which concerns a specific group, frontline employees, in a specific design, prepaid degrees, over a specific period, the years after graduation. The second version narrowed to frontline employees but still asked about turnover during enrollment. The third version, below, moves the question to the period the literature has studied least.

What Is Known and the Gap

The Unit 5 synthesis matrix organized the literature into four positions. Participation is associated with lower turnover during enrollment (Benson et al., 2004). Part of that association reflects which employees choose to enroll (Manchester, 2012). Degrees raise graduates' value to other employers, and graduates passed over for promotion leave at higher rates (Benson et al., 2004). Support for development is associated with lower turnover mainly where employees see internal career opportunities (Kraimer et al., 2011). Almost all of this evidence comes from salaried employees in reimbursement programs. No refereed study follows frontline employees in prepaid programs past graduation while also measuring the internal roles open to them. That is the gap.

The literature knows what happens while employees study; it knows far less about what happens after hourly workers graduate.

Why This Gap Matters Now

The gap has become more consequential in recent years. Large employers in retail, logistics and banking have announced programs that pay tuition up front for frontline workers, often through education benefit vendors, and many smaller employers are copying them. These programs differ from the reimbursement programs studied in the past in three ways: they serve employees with lower pay and less prior education, they remove the financial barrier of paying first and waiting for reimbursement, and many drop the repayment clause. Each difference could change how graduates behave. An employer deciding whether to adopt such a program today must rely on evidence from a different kind of program and a different kind of employee.

Consequences

The consequences fall on three groups. Employers spend substantial sums on education benefits; a bank that prepays degrees for several hundred employees a year could spend several million dollars annually, and if graduates leave within two years, much of that spending benefits other employers. Employees who graduate into roles that do not use their degrees may leave for jobs elsewhere that do, which may serve them well, but may also leave them with fewer internal paths than the program implied. And the communities where frontline employees live are affected by whether education benefits translate into local career advancement. Hom et al. (2017) note that turnover imposes costs on organizations through lost knowledge and replacement, which makes the question material for any employer weighing these programs.

Who Would Use the Answer

Three audiences would use an answer. Bank executives deciding whether to adopt or expand prepaid programs need to know whether graduates stay, and whether pairing the program with internal pathways changes that. Education benefit vendors, who design and sell these programs, need evidence beyond their own client reports. And researchers studying turnover and development need to know whether the opportunity moderator found among salaried employees holds for frontline workers. A study answering the questions below would serve all three, which is part of what makes the problem worth a doctoral project.

Research Questions

Question 1. Among frontline employees at US regional banks, how does voluntary turnover in the three years after degree completion differ between graduates of employer-prepaid degree programs and comparable employees who did not participate?

Question 2. To what extent does internal promotion or transfer after graduation account for any difference in turnover?

The questions do not yet commit to a method. Unit 10 and later courses will consider whether records from several banks, with variation in the timing of program adoption, could support a comparison stronger than the participant versus non-participant contrast that the vendor studies used.

Can the Data Be Reached?

The candidate's bank has agreed in principle to provide anonymized records of program participation, promotion and resignation, subject to institutional review. Two other regional banks in a professional network have expressed interest. Records of internal job postings, needed to measure opportunity, exist at the candidate's bank but have not yet been requested at the others. Access will need to be confirmed before the question can be considered feasible. If only the candidate's bank provides data, the study could still answer the second question within one organization, but the first question would then describe one bank rather than regional banks generally, and the problem statement would be narrowed again to say so.

Limits of the Draft

The draft relies on one bank's figures to illustrate the specific problem, which may not represent other banks. It treats promotion and transfer together, though they may affect turnover differently. And it does not yet address whether economic conditions during the study period, such as a tight labor market, would change graduates' outside options.

References

Benson, G. S., Finegold, D., & Mohrman, S. A. (2004). You paid for the skills, now keep them: Tuition reimbursement and voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 47(3), 315-331. https://doi.org/10.5465/20159584

Cappelli, P. (2004). Why do employers pay for college? Journal of Econometrics, 121(1-2), 213-241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2003.10.014

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Kraimer, M. L., Seibert, S. E., Wayne, S. J., Liden, R. C., & Bravo, J. (2011). Antecedents and outcomes of organizational support for development: The critical role of career opportunities. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(3), 485-500. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021452

Manchester, C. F. (2012). General human capital and employee mobility: How tuition reimbursement increases retention through sorting and participation. ILR Review, 65(4), 951-974. https://doi.org/10.1177/001979391206500408