BOUNDLESS LEARNING

At the end of each workday, Nyasia Lloyd boards a Durham-Raleigh Express bus in front of Duke University Hospital for the roughly hour-long ride home to Raleigh.

For Lloyd, a graduate education coordinator with the Duke University School of Medicine who has worked at Duke since 2015, this isn’t time to unwind.

Since Lloyd, 44, resumed her college education in 2017, she has used daily bus rides to dive into textbooks or scholarly articles on her iPad while studying for an associate degree from Wake Technical Community College and a bachelor’s degree from UNC Greensboro, degrees she received with financial help through Duke’s Employee Tuition Assistance Program.

And now, also with the help of the benefit, she’s two semesters into the higher education administration master’s degree program at North Carolina Central University, which she expects to complete next fall.

“It’s been super helpful, especially for a working adult,” said Lloyd, who briefly attended college in the 1990s but felt that it wasn’t the right fit at the time. “College can be very expensive. But with this, it’s not as hard as you think.”

Dating back to 2017, Duke has invested nearly $16.1 million in helping its employees, including Lloyd, get a degree by providing reimbursement of up to $5,250 per calendar year for tuition at Duke or any other accredited higher education institution.

Earlier this year, Duke expanded the benefit, reducing the waiting period to become eligible from two years to six months. And in a move surpassing some peer institutions, Duke expanded the benefit from being exclusive to North Carolina schools to encompass institutions nationwide. The Watts College of Nursing in Durham has also been added as an eligible institution.

“When employees join the Duke family, we want to provide them with the stepping stones to help them continue to grow and build their careers,” said Antwan Lofton, Vice President of Duke Human Resources. “This benefit doesn’t just help them in their current job; it also allows them to continue working toward their dreams and their goals of lifelong learning.”

Workers have placed an increased value on pursuing educational goals or building skills. In its recent national employee benefits survey, the Society for Human Resource Management found that 65% of employees ranked professional and career development benefits, such as tuition assistance, as a very or extremely important benefit for an employer to offer. The figure is up from 37% in the previous year’s report, suggesting that employees are moving past pandemic-era uncertainty and looking toward their futures.

While Duke has expanded its benefit, the survey indicates a sluggish expansion of educational benefits among employers, with employee tuition assistance dropping from 56% in 2019 to 48% in 2022.

“This is a wonderful investment in Duke,” Lofton said of the benefit. “It ensures that we can continue to hire and retain the top skilled employees and allows them to further their careers.”

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