When LaGuardia Community College was established in 1971, its first president established a culture of innovation and experimentation that, according to faculty and administrators, has persisted to this day. In part, this culture represented an effort to develop a particular niche at a time when several community colleges were being established in New York. The spirit of innovation was also a vision of what a community college might be, since this institution was relatively unfettered by any long history of institutional orthodoxy or regulatory imperatives. Over the years, there have been two major sources of innovation. From its inception, LaGuardia has been a mandatory co-op college, in which all full-time students are required to enroll in cooperative education.[2] The rationales for co-op were and remain those commonly associated with cooperative education: the opportunity to learn in different ways, to connect school-based learning to its applications, to explore occupational alternatives, and to earn money while in school. In addition, LaGuardia embodies an unusual commitment to teaching, expressed specifically in a series of learning communities and in staff development designed to expand innovative teaching practices like cooperative learning and project-based education (Gabelnick, MacGregor, Matthews, & Smith, 1990; Matthews, 1994).
In other ways, however, LaGuardia is the epitome of a community college, particularly in the composition of its students and its embodiment of the "people's college." The variety of races, languages, and ages at LaGuardia is almost overwhelming, even for two observers from California accustomed to great variation in community college students. There are 84 languages, and so many racial and ethnic groups that the familiar categories--black, Hispanic, Asian, or white--lose their meaning. LaGuardia is in many ways an educational representation of Emma Lazarus' stirring words on the nearby Statue of Liberty:
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
In the co-op program, every full-time student--including those majoring in liberal arts--is required to enroll in three 12-week internships or co-op placements, varying from 15 to 40 hours per week, depending on the internship agency needs and the student's schedule.[3] Certain students are exempted from the co-op requirement, including those in areas that have their own practicums (like nursing) and evening students who are assumed to have jobs and, therefore, not to need the introduction to employment that co-op provides.[4] In theory, the three placements may progress from relatively introductory positions to more skilled and demanding employment, and this tends to happen in technical fields; however, when students use the co-op for career exploration, as is common for liberal arts students, this kind of progression is difficult to achieve. Students may receive credit by exemption for one co-op based on submission of a written analysis of prior work experience, or may waive co-op if they have had substantial work experience in their chosen major. Those who are currently employed may request to use their employment as an internship site or may attend an internship for as few as 15 hours per week. Students earn 9 of the 66 credits they need to graduate from the three co-op education courses, with the course defined as an internship and a seminar. Because they are considered students while in co-op, they generate city and state revenue that is used to support the co-op program (and, in turn, the co-op faculty) and pay tuition equal to a 12 credit load.[5]
Students must have completed all the prerequisites for a major--which generally requires having completed coursework in remedial education or English as a Second Language (ESL) if necessary--as well as at least one introductory course in their major, and they must maintain a 2.0 average. These are mechanisms of quality control, of course, but they also mean that there are substantial numbers of students enrolled at the college who are not participating in co-op. For example, in fall 1994, there were 10,592 students enrolled in LaGuardia, with about 500 in co-op. However, of the 10,592 students, only 2,308 were eligible for co-op; the remainder were in majors that do not participate in co-op because they have their own practicum, were evening students for whom co-op is not required, had not yet completed the prerequisites for co-op, or had low GPAs that disqualified them. As a result, while only 5% of all students were in co-op, about 22% of eligible students were in co-op.
Faculty in the Cooperative Education Division have full faculty status and fulfill several roles. All faculty members advise students, assisting them in setting individual learning objectives for the co-op experience, in selecting each co-op placement, and in evaluating and grading the internship experience; co-op faculty also teach the Co-op Preparation (Co-op Prep) course. In addition, each faculty member develops and coordinates a number of internship sites, acting as a liaison between internship supervisors and students by screening students for those sites, arranging interviews with internship supervisors, and visiting the internship site during the internship period. Students may work with two faculty if they select an internship that is coordinated by a faculty member other than their advisor. Also, some faculty elect to teach one of the co-op seminars, and are paid adjunct stipends for this additional responsibility. This arrangement provides continuity of advisement for students and continuity of coordination for internship placement sites.
The college publishes an updated listing of potential internship sites four times a year describing co-op placements available in various major areas[6], and each student receives faculty assistance in the selection of a placement. The kinds of co-op placements are, not surprisingly, quite varied. Co-op faculty report that many positions have been offered continuously over a number of years, with a number of agencies, such as hospitals, offering a mix of internships (including clerical, patient care, accounting, and customer service). Placements in public and private enterprises differ in a number of ways. Public agencies usually accept both part- and full-time interns, usually offer volunteer rather than paid positions, are able to provide paraprofessional types of experiences, and have negligible hire rates following the internships. Private firms tend to offer less varied experiences initially, expanding responsibilities as the student demonstrates the capacity to work well; they generally prefer a full-time commitment, provide a wage or stipend (usually in the range of $6 to $8 an hour), and often offer employment to students following the internship. Workplace supervisors in both the public and private sectors were forthright about their determination to match the task to the student's ability, and to increase responsibility as the student demonstrates competency. In addition, all of the supervisors and faculty we interviewed warned against assuming that co-op placements involve only low-level skills, pointing out that new technologies and workplace organizations require sophisticated decisionmaking, problem solving with clients, gathering of and organizing data, and knowledge of the company structure for all employees. Contrary to conventional wisdom about the need for contracts or written agreements about placements, co-op positions are based on informal oral agreements between employers and co-op faculty.[7]
The co-op program has a well-developed rationale, which has been elaborated over the years. The Cooperative Education Student Handbook (Nesoff et al., 1990) describes its three purposes[8]:
A more complex description of learning objectives includes the following:
At an even more general level, Harry Heinemann (1983)--for many years the Dean of Cooperative Education programs--has served as a kind of theoretician of co-op and of the role of the co-op seminar. He first articulated a model of co-op in which classroom instruction drove the co-op experience, and in which work placements were "field laboratories" in which concepts and theories introduced in the class would be applied or observed on the job. A more recent version (Heinemann, DeFalco, & Smelkinson, 1991) acknowledged that this earlier model was limited because it restricted the lessons of work-based learning to the perspectives of a single discipline; in the most recent articulation, work-based placements should be viewed from a variety of disciplines, and the work experience (rather than the classroom learning) should become more central. As is apparent in the next section, LaGuardia currently operates co-op seminars under each of these rationales. Elsewhere he has clarified the Deweyan roots of co-op education as "an educational experience that will integrate the world beyond the classroom and the curriculum" (Heinemann & DeFalco, 1990, p. 39). As a result, one can find at LaGuardia a highly developed conception of the role of co-op within a broader education.
However, the extent to which co-op faculty and adjunct instructors understand the complexity of these goals for co-op education is unclear. To be sure, the faculty and adjunct instructors we interviewed were highly committed to co-op, and understood it as an important complement to class-based instruction. However, most of them stated that the purposes of co-op at LaGuardia were not written down and--not surprisingly, for a program with many different facets--they stressed different aspects of co-op, just as instructors everywhere differ in their conceptions of education and of which elements are most important. One stated that, "You should know the rationale for this class; in my opinion, it is to adhere to career exploration," while others were clearly more committed to conveying specific information or to communicating the norms of the workplace. In the classes we observed (described in the section titled, "The Conduct of the Co-op Seminars"), these differences emerged as varying emphases in the material presented, with some possibilities ignored by certain instructors. One implication of the variety of perspectives about co-op education is that, in order to realize the potential of the many different forms of learning that can take place with the help of work-based learning, instructors need to understand this variety of purposes.
The co-op program at LaGuardia has many elements to it, and the college has been careful to articulate the role of each of them. There are nine sources of learning:
The purpose of this extensive list is that the college clarifies, to students and to employers alike, that there are many distinct elements of cooperative education: It is not simply a job whose implications for learning are taken for granted, but an experience where many different elements contribute to the overall learning that takes place.
In addition to the co-op seminar itself, several other elements of the co-op program could be viewed as connecting activities. The co-op faculty advisor is obviously the most crucial link between the institution (and, in turn, the student) and the employer. In addition, the Co-op Prep course is a kind of connecting activity that could be adopted in all STW programs. This 12-hour course introduces students to the co-op program, starting with the following rationale for co-op: "LaGuardia's educational philosophy is that learning takes place in many different settings both in and outside the classroom." Co-op Prep also prepares students for their first co-op placement by developing both their behavioral and their general job-related competencies. It teaches them some of the skills necessary for finding a co-op placement, including those of writing rsums, filling out applications, interviewing for jobs, and the like. During the course, students are asked to state their "life accomplishments" and to consider their own skills and proclivities, and, therefore, the course is related to career exploration--one of the prominent purposes of the co-op seminar as well. To be sure, such activities are common in occupationally related programs; however, the advantage of the Co-op Prep course is that the application of these skills is immediate, as students use them as they begin to search for co-op placements. Indeed, from our observations of several Co-op Prep classes, the anxiety of students preparing to go out on a real interview for a real job is so high that some version of co-op preparation is crucial.
From the conception of nine separate sources of learning, and the elaboration of such elements as Co-op Prep and the co-op seminar, it is clear that LaGuardia has thought hard over a long period of time about the multiple elements of a successful program. One implication for STW programs, then, is that they should not simply be considered as ways to add work placements to school-based programs. Instead, STW programs need to be considered as a complex series of experiences, combining a variety of both in-school and out-of-school activities, each of which can contribute to the overall quality of learning.
A final and crucial aspect of LaGuardia's co-op program is its relationship to the rest of the institution. The co-op faculty have full faculty status and, therefore, participate in all governance process mechanisms and in the staff development activities of the college. In addition, there have been many cases of collaboration between co-op and other departments; for example, the development of curriculum materials and the T.A.R. approach (which is described later in this monograph) was a joint activity involving both co-op faculty and occupational faculty. There have been joint activities in curriculum planning, identifying workplace applications relevant to coursework, initiating new courses or programs, and sharing in professional development. The co-op program has worked with the English department in terms of how to bolster student writing, and with humanities faculty about how to increase oral communication skills; a mandatory human, technology and society course for all liberal arts majors was jointly developed with co-op faculty; a math instructor helped develop the co-op seminar; and co-op faculty jointly developed the Education Associate curriculum, now in the social sciences department. However, despite the frequency of these forms of collaboration, they seem to focus on particular tasks and then evaporate. There are no ongoing or systematic efforts to coordinate the content of "regular" (non-co-op) classes with the co-op placements; most of the non-co-op faculty have little awareness of what takes place in the co-op program; and few faculty make use of co-op experiences in their classes.
Over the years, there has not been a systematic effort to "market" co-op to the regular faculty, and so, the special benefits of co-op education are unknown to many faculty. The sense of LaGuardia as a unique "co-op college" has therefore dissipated as new faculty have joined and as the number of part-time faculty loosely connected to the institution have grown. To some extent, then, the co-op program has the feel of an appendage, serving large numbers of students, yet in some way peripheral to the core of the institution. This illustrates the problem with maintaining innovative educational practices over time, particularly in institutions with new faculty and part-time faculty who come in with much more conventional notions of what colleges are.
A potentially dire consequence of the separation of co-op from "regular" programs is occurring now, with a budget crisis of unprecedented magnitude. The CUNY System, of which LaGuardia is a part, has called for budget cuts up to 40%. This situation has unleashed a war of all against all, in which co-op education is particularly vulnerable because of its peripheral and non-course status. In particular, many faculty have been looking to cut the 9-credit co-op requirement because of a need to find credits for remedial purposes in already crowded student schedules.
In this respect, unfortunately, LaGuardia is no different from the other exemplary co-op programs we have examined. In the two-year colleges in Cincinnati, the mandatory co-op programs are also virtually independent of the classroom-based component (Grubb & Villeneuve, 1995; Villeneuve & Grubb, 1996). This kind of separation not only reduces the potential for school-based and work-based components to reinforce one another, it also creates political problems, particularly in periods of declining resources. The co-op administrators at Cincinnati Technical College have been nervous about the future role of co-op as that institution becomes a comprehensive community college, since they fear that an academic component will diminish the perceived importance of co-op. For STW programs, the separation of school-based and work-based components--even in institutions with exemplary co-op programs of long standing--indicates how difficult it may be to knit the two together.
[3] On the nature of co-op at LaGuardia, see Nesoff et al. (1990) and Weintraub (1992).
[4] However, a large fraction of the evening students are there to change their occupations, for which co-op would be valuable; and a small number of evening students do enroll in co-op.
[5] The funding mechanism for the LaGuardia co-op program, through regular attendance-based state revenue, is therefore similar to the funding in the Cincinnati programs. One administrator reported that the co-op placements generate about 4% of LaGuardia's overall revenue.
[6] The majors at LaGuardia include accounting, animal health technology, bilingual teaching aide, business administration, business management, commercial food service, commercial photography, computer science, computer operations, computer technology, data processing, dietary technician, emergency medical technician, human services, liberal arts, liberal arts and sciences, mortuary science, nursing, occupational therapy, office technology, physical therapy, secretarial science, school food service, and travel and tourism. All of the licensure programs require a practicum whose content is dictated by the state, and are not included in the co-op program.
[7] The same informal structure is also true in the Cincinnati co-op programs, profiled in Grubb and Villeneuve (1995) and Villeneuve and Grubb (1996).
[8] These and many other elements of the co-op programs and the integrative seminars are stated consistently in different college publications. It seems, therefore, that there has been a conscious effort to develop a uniform vision of the co-op program, and then to convey that vision consistently throughout the program.