You're Spending Thousands Per Employee on Education Benefits. Do You Know If It's Working?

Here's the question most benefits teams never get asked: what actually happened to the employees who used your tuition benefit last year?

Not whether they submitted receipts. Not whether the vendor processed the reimbursement. What happened to them? Did they finish the degree, did they stay, did the work get better?

For most companies, nobody knows.

A Lumina Foundation study found fewer than 25% of employers systematically track whether employees complete degrees or how education affects performance. This, despite U.S. employers spending roughly $28 billion a year on tuition assistance programs. That's not a rounding error. That's a significant line item with almost no feedback loop attached to it.

The Cigna retention finding gets cited constantly in this space, employees using tuition benefits had 8x lower turnover than non-participants. It's a striking number. But the reason it keeps getting cited is that it's unusual. Most companies never ran that analysis. Cigna did the work. Almost everyone else is just guessing.

The root cause isn't laziness. It's structure. Tuition reimbursement often lives in finance, or gets handed off to a third-party vendor, completely separate from the systems where HR tracks performance and retention. There's no natural junction where the data meets. Linkage analysis isn't just hard...it's architecturally blocked.

So benefits teams end up knowing that money went out the door, but not much else.

The participation picture is equally murky. EdAssist surveys consistently show only 2% to 5% of eligible employees actually use tuition benefits in a given year. That's a very low number for a benefit companies spend real money to offer. And most employers can't explain it. They don't know if the process is too complicated, if employees don't know the benefit exists, or if the eligible population just isn't interested.

You can't fix what you can't see.

This is exactly the kind of problem that shouldn't require a data science team to solve. The data exists...in reimbursement records, in HRIS systems, in performance reviews. The gap is that nobody has connected it and nobody has built a simple way to ask the questions.

For a benefits or HR admin, the practical starting point is small. Pull last year's tuition reimbursement list. Cross-reference it against your retention data. See if the people who used the benefit are still with the company. That one query won't give you a Cigna-level study, but it'll tell you more than you knew yesterday.

From there, the question becomes whether your systems can even support that kind of look-back and if not, that's worth surfacing. Because right now, a lot of organizations are essentially writing checks into the dark.

Twenty-eight billion dollars is a lot of shovels to hand out without ever checking whether anyone dug anything.