Target expands Dream to Be, offering tuition support from day one

Target is widening the path from a shift in the store to a longer career inside the company, and Dream to Be is now one of its clearest tools for doing it. The education benefit is available from day one for eligible U.S.-based team members, including part-time and full-time workers, and it now covers about 500 tuition-free or partially funded programs across more than 40 schools, colleges and universities.

The menu is broad enough to map to real job moves inside Target. Team members can pursue high school completion, undergraduate and master’s degrees, certificates, bootcamps and language learning, along with programs in fields such as AI, analytics and merchandising. That gives a store associate who wants to move toward HR one route, a team lead aiming for stronger management skills another, and a supply chain worker building technical depth a third. Target’s broader growth-and-development pages tie that education support to on-the-job development, mentorship and leadership programming across the company.

The scale has grown quickly since Target launched the debt-free education assistance program in August 2021. At the start, Target said more than 340,000 U.S.-based part-time and full-time frontline team members would be eligible, and the company said it would invest $200 million over four years. The original version included 250 business-aligned programs from more than 40 schools. By 2025, Target said the catalog had roughly doubled to about 500 programs.

Target says the program is already producing results. More than 10,000 team members have graduated from Dream to Be programs since launch, and there have been more than 40,000 enrollments. Target’s careers page said more than 32,000 team members had enrolled, while the company’s values materials said the program had drawn more than 30,000 enrollments, mostly from frontline workers. However the count is framed, the message is the same: thousands of workers are using the benefit to move into the next step rather than treating it as a side perk.

That fits a larger pattern at Target. The company says it has given 5% of its profits to communities since 1946, and its first store opened in 1962. Today, Target says it completes 10 million hours of training annually and pairs Dream to Be with programs such as the Store Director Development Program for store leaders and the Technology Leadership Program for aspiring tech professionals. For workers weighing whether Target is a short stop or a place to build a career, Dream to Be is designed to answer that question early.