A different form of connection to employers comes in work experience and cooperative programs, which combine formal schooling with on-the-job experience; apprenticeship programs, sometimes operated through community colleges or area vocational schools, often accomplish the same combination of classroom-based and work-based learning. Often, work experience and co-op programs have made no effort to ensure that the on-the-job component has any educational value or is connected to the classroom instruction, so work experience programs have often been criticized as little more than release time for low-skilled work. When appropriately constructed, however, work experience programs can provide a different and complementary approach to learning. In addition, they can promote connections between education providers and employers through the process of establishing cooperative programs, of determining appropriate employment, and of formulating the right balance of classroom instruction and on-the-job learning, which requires extensive coordination between the two.
Despite the possible advantages of work experience programs, very few educational providers in three of our four areas have established them.[52] The notable exception is the Cotooli area, where well-established co-op programs exist in all the secondary area vocational schools, the two-year technical institutes, and four-year colleges. Co-op programs in that area--sometimes described as "the birthplace of co-ops"--started around 1906 with a partnership between the local university and a prominent manufacturer of milling machines. They have since spread informally without much organized structure. Virtually all employers we interviewed have had some experience with co-op programs, and almost all report them to be excellent.[53] Even those that have not adopted co-op programs have nonetheless heard extensively about them; as the personnel director of one valve manufacturer--a firm that had not developed a co-op program--reported,
One thing I've heard from other people is that the schools that have some type of internship or co-op program, whether the school requires it or the students are free to elect it, that seems to make a big difference in how well they do [on the job]. Part of that has to do with just getting out and seeing what it's like to work.
Because of the lack of standardization, co-op programs in Cotooli vary among firms and educational providers. However, it is common for students to alternate semesters at work and school.[54] Often, students are paired so that when one co-op student leaves the job for a semester of schooling, his or her counterpart begins a co-op semester; in this way, employers have a continuous employee and educational enrollments are also stable. Many firms have tuition reimbursement programs for their co-op students; in addition, some provide equipment and materials to the co-op program.
Some co-op programs have minimum GPA requirements for entry, clarifying that they are in part screening mechanisms. More importantly, students whose job performance or schooling performance is substandard are dropped from the program. In one large program, for example, students have to pay for the schooling component themselves if they go on probation and are dropped if they fail courses, providing both fiscal and employment incentives to keep their grades up. Completing a co-op program successfully does not guarantee a job[55] since that depends on the number of vacancies that develop in particular occupations and varies with the business cycle as well as retirements and turnover.[56] However, firms involved with co-op programs often hire only co-op students for their entry-level positions, so these programs are the only ways into certain jobs.
Well-run co-op programs provide both formal classroom education and specific, hands-on experience and allow students to see the application of classroom instruction. Given the importance of experience to hiring (documented at greater length in the next section), the specific experience co-op students acquire is critical to their being hired. In addition, the co-op program itself is a screening mechanism, allowing the firm to observe the individual working and to learn about the personal capacities--motivation, diligence, interpersonal skills, and the like--that are so crucial to employment. In the following, a personnel manager for a prominent machine-tool company in Cotooli described the advantage to both the student and the firm:
One thing that [the local technical college] is doing is to force everybody through an apprenticeship program or an intern program. That's exactly the reason that they have at least some experience and they know the application of what they're learning. . . . Once they graduate, we have a tendency to hire those people. So then, when they're competing [with other applicants], they're competing with other people who have two-year or college degrees, but they have some hands-on experience in the company; we know them and they know us. . . . And at least half of [my company's] motivation [for participating in the co-op program] is to have these people whom we've been able to watch, we've been able to train--and upon their graduation we've got full-time employees.
From the students' vantage, a co-op placement is a screening mechanism in another sense: It allows an individual to see whether an occupation is suitable. "They haven't spent five years in engineering school to wake up one day to find out they don't like the work." In addition, some co-ops try to place students in a variety of positions so they can get a broad overview of the jobs available in a firm.
A rather different advantage of co-op programs is that they generate sustained contact between employers and educational institutions. In most cases, employers initiate the process and establish the terms of the co-op programs. The director of co-op programs for a medium-sized machine manufacturer of about five hundred employers described the process:
Before we have a co-op program, we have to define the need for what our potential employee growth is going to be. And once we determine that, then we determine what kind of person do we want and ultimately what kind of position would they have. And then we contact five, six, seven, or eight schools and we narrow our choices down to three, we make a campus visit, talk to their instructors, we interview their students, we audit a class, we examine their curriculum, and then we invite them here to do the same with us. We share our mission statement, the future direction of the company, and then we select one school. For instance, we use the University of Cotooli for electrical engineering for their four-year degree program, but we also use Cotooli Technical College for their mechanical engineering but not the University of Cotooli. So it depends on what the curriculum is, what is the kind of education they get, theory versus practical or hands-on.
In fact, this firm had co-op programs with eight different educational institutions, including high schools and two- and four-year colleges. The partnership with these institutions is developed in other ways as well:
We recently had a partnership day with a technical college, and the heads of the departments and the placement officers and some of the teacher came to [the firm] for a couple of hours and we had a tour of the company and then we had a brainstorming session on how we can help one another. And we provide tours for classes at these schools, plus we also provide guest speakers. We send our engineers and our machinists over to do a class if they want them to. And then also where the schools are recruiting at the high school level, we send one of our managers and one of our employees that used to be a co-op, and they do high school recruiting with the colleges as well. So we don't take a co-op from college and say we're going to give them a job. We develop the whole partnership aspect. We don't just take their people; it's how can we help you develop your students as well.
In addition, the students in co-op placements provide another source of information about employment. As the director of contract education in Cotooli Technical College described it,
The co-op program forces us to have closer ties with business. . . . Students will bring back information to class about the ways in which they do a procedure that's very different than the way it's being taught. If we think that it's better, we'll change the curriculum.
The educational institutions with co-op programs also have more active placement efforts than do the community colleges in the other three communities we examined. As one personnel director reported,
If I need a co-op [student] in anything, I can call [the local technical college] and within a half hour they will have begun faxing some backgrounds.
Finally, the co-op programs generate incentives for both education providers and employers to improve the quality of their education and their jobs, respectively, otherwise students will not enroll and employers will not provide jobs. A co-op administrator described the incentives for employers to offer decent jobs:
I inform [employers] if they have a low campus image and nobody wants to interview with their company--because students bring this back, too, you know. There's nothing that can kill a program quicker than students coming back and complaining about their co-op job, so the students really talk to one another about these things--how much they make, what they're doing, and so forth. I mean, there's a lot of buzz on campus about different businesses and where the "good" jobs are. So employers need to know that.
At the same time, the educational institutions have to be sure to send students appropriate for the kind of work involved rather than "clunkers":
If [employers] got clunkers every time, if they got somebody who couldn't do the job or learn the job--they would, of course, generally be able to deal with that on a once a year basis [but they wouldn't put up with it often]. If a coordinator doesn't screen an applicant sufficiently for the job--I mean, if you put a student out on a job, for example, in drafting or in CAD, and the student hates offices and wants to be in a factory or outside--that is not [going to work well]. So there's a certain amount of common sense to make sure that the situation works right.
These co-op programs therefore screen both students and jobs so that able students are matched with promising jobs and so both students and employers have sufficient information and there is an appropriate match.[57]
The consequence of the co-op programs in Cotooli is that the distance between education providers and employers, so notable in other regions, has been effectively overcome: Employers spoke knowledgeably and positively about specific educational institutions, routinely hired students from the co-op program, and displayed none of the indifference to the educational system that we found in other areas.
[52] In Rosefield, Palmdale, and Frankton, we uncovered only one co-op program, operated by a local Air Force base near Rosefield for machinists and electronics technicians. Those responsible for this program describe its advantages in terms similar to those of the Cotooli co-ops.
[53] Of the thirty-five different employers we interviewed in the Cotooli area, only one was dissatisfied with the co-op programs and had terminated its participation.
[54] In one of these institutions, for example, semesters are ten weeks long and the school operates throughout the year rather than on a standard academic calendar. Over a two-year program, then, an individual will have five semesters of coursework and five semesters of co-op placement. The Rosefield co-op program has another option called the "parallel program" in which students work a half day and attend school a half day. This has the advantage of not interrupting employment for a semester.
[55] One community college claimed one hundred percent placement from a particular co-op program, but other institutions were careful to note that they could not guarantee jobs because so much about placement depends on the state of the economy, the random timing of job openings, the personal qualities of students, and other factors beyond their control.
[56] For example, one firm reports hiring only twenty-five percent of their co-ops during the current recession, compared to over fifty percent in normal times; another reported eighty-five to ninety percent hiring in good times, compared to fifty percent now.
[57] Of course, it is also possible for a "low quality equilibrium" to develop where the least able students are matched with the worst kinds of jobs; this has happened, for example, with the Cotooli Employment Service, and some work experience programs are also reputed to follow this pattern. An interesting question is how co-op programs in Cotooli have managed to establish "high-quality equilibria."