But even though school-based forms of work preparation have dominated ever since, there have been equally serious doubts about its appropriateness. Indeed, federal support for vocational education--heavily influenced by the German apprenticeship system--was initially envisioned as a way of combining school-based and work-based preparation: Individuals starting work would continue their formal schooling in "continuation schools" that they would attend after the work day. Vocational education did not develop in that direction, of course, but co-op education did develop and lived on, albeit in small numbers. Periodically, educational reformers would decry the distance between school and work, school and community, school and politics, and propose mechanisms to narrow this gap. Indeed, this notion was most recently promoted just twenty years ago, when the rediscovery of the "irrelevance" of schooling generated a barrage of commission reports, and calls for early graduation and work experience programs as better ways of preparing students for their future roles (Grubb, 1989; Timpane, Abramowitz, Bobrow, & Pascal, 1976).
And the cycle has turned yet again. We are now in the midst of great enthusiasm for work-based learning, incited in part by a continued infatuation with the German apprenticeship system (e.g., Hamilton, 1990) and in part by a new realization that many of the skills required at work--and especially for high-productivity work--cannot be well taught in schools. According to the reports of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (1991), for example, the high-skill workplace now requires not only "foundation skills"--basic academic skills including reading, writing, math, listening, and speaking--but also thinking skills (such as decision-making, problem-solving, knowing how to learn, as well as personal qualities such as responsibility, sociability, self-management, integrity, and honesty. But many of these "thinking skills" and behavioral traits can only be taught in an appropriate context; and since schools can only mimic the conditions of work and not precisely replicate them, it has seemed natural to call for work-based learning as the solution. For example, the William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family, and Citizenship (1988), siding with the "forgotten half" poorly served by the conventional academic curriculum, argued for a mix of "abstract" and experiential learning:
These experience-based educational mechanisms offer some of the most exciting opportunities available anywhere in America for sound learning and healthy personal development. For some young people, certainly, they can be vastly more productive than schools or colleges. And that is why we consider "educational institutions" to include not only classrooms, libraries, and laboratories, but also other environments where purposeful and effective learning can take place: the workplace, public and non-profit agencies, museums and cultural institutions, the media, youth agencies and community services, field studies and workshops in the out-of-doors, and community-based organizations in the inner city. (p. 129)One policy response has been the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, which provides federal funds for programs that incorporate school-based and work-based learning with "connecting activities" linking the two. And so, with the enthusiasm that Americans reserve for the presumptively novel, localities and states have begun planning school-to-work programs, worrying about whether enough employers can be recruited, puzzling through the nature of "connecting activities," and occasionally even worrying about how school programs currently in place need to be modified to fit school-to-work programs.
In the enthusiasm for school-to-work, however, there have been few experiences to guide policymakers and program planners. There have been, to be sure, some experimental programs established (see Goldberger, Kazis, & O'Flanagan, 1994; Hamilton, 1990; Pauly, Kopp, & Haimson, 1995), though none of them have been around long enough to know much about how they work. Furthermore, there have been some efforts to distill the lessons of existing work-based programs, including work experience, cooperative education, school-based enterprises, and other school partnerships with businesses (e.g., Stern, Finkelstein, Stone, Latting, & Dornsife, 1995). These can be viewed as natural experiments--examples where work-based learning has survived despite the strong pressures toward school-based preparation of the workforce. Unfortunately, in most cases, these natural experiments in work-based education enroll small numbers, or exist under special and atypical conditions--small comfort to those who hope to develop a school-to-work system in this country.
The case of Cincinnati is different. Co-op programs combining school-based and work-based learning have been present in that city ever since 1906. Though they started in a four-year college--the University of Cincinnati, usually considered the birthplace of co-op in this country--they have since spread to community colleges and area vocational schools. Rather than enrolling just a few students, or one or two employers, they are a dominant feature of Cincinnati, well-known even to those employers who do not use them. The result is that work-based education has become part of the culture, widely practiced and well-accepted by employers, educators, and students alike--a phenomenon that exists, as far as we know, in no other community in the United States. As examples of indigenous school-to-work programs, the Cincinnati co-op programs have advantages that are lacking in more isolated programs.
This monograph therefore describes the Cincinnati co-op programs in detail, in order to derive the implications from this experience for school-to-work programs. There are, of course, differences between these programs and the school-to-work efforts as many proponents envision them. In particular, the Cincinnati programs lack skill standards and the certification of skills--in certificates of mastery and other similar credentials--that are the driving force behind some current school-to-work proposals. But these differences are instructive, too, because they illustrate that school-to-work can become widespread, can be institutionalized, and can be of high quality without skill standards and formal certification.
Schneider, concerned as present critics are with the adequacy and relevance of education to future work, identified two problems that could be addressed through cooperative education: (1) most students worked at least part-time, but usually in jobs unrelated to their future careers; and (2) there were components to the engineering curriculum that could not be taught in a classroom setting, contributing to the fact that many entry-level workers lacked appropriate experiences. Expanding the opportunities available to students through a combination of work-based and school-based learning activities promised to solve these problems.[1]
Most of the early programs were in engineering, primarily at four-year colleges. In 1917, the program at the University of Cincinnati was extended from engineering to business administration. Four years later, cooperative education in liberal arts programs was started with the idea of providing a "clear understanding of contemporary society" to students who otherwise were on sheltered campuses (Ryder et al., 1987, p. 9). Co-op programs were extended to two-year colleges in Cincinnati in 1937 when the Ohio Mechanics Institute--then a private institution, later affiliated with the University of Cincinnati as the Ohio College of Applied Science (OCAS)--adopted co-op because the lure of part-time jobs would increase enrollments. Employers in the area were used to the co-op plan because of the University of Cincinnati's experience, and had recommended the approach when the Institute decided to offer associate degree programs in mechanical and electrical engineering technology. The programs at Cincinnati Technical College started in the late 1960s, partly in response to a perceived void in fields where OCAS did not provide training; as in the earlier case of the Ohio Mechanics Institute, the introduction of co-op programs was eased by the prevalence of this approach in Cincinnati. Parallel to the growth of community colleges in general, there was tremendous growth in co-op education in two-year colleges during the 1960s (Ryder et al., 1987).
While we were unable to uncover any definitive reasons why only Cincinnati has developed extensive co-op programs, the long history of practice is the most common explanation offered by educators and employers alike. There is a tremendous sense of this history among employers, students, and educators, and the co-op tradition tends to perpetuate co-op programs as former co-op students continue the programs. For example, the human resources representative of one company, who had been there for 21 years, said that co-op was prevalent in his company even when he started, and there was a history of employees who started at the company as co-ops:
We have some employees, as I understand it, who started as co-ops who are still here. My understanding is that we have been in it from the beginning of time, since the program actually initiated. We were one of the first companies to be involved. We had someone retire, about five years ago, he was the vice president of engineering, and he started here as a co-op.At one company, it was estimated that one-quarter of the 1,000 employees started as co-ops; at still another, three senior vice presidents had started as co-op students, indicating that the experience was common at high levels. These examples of deeply entrenched history were repeated by many companies. The result of the history and prevalence of co-ops is that even new firms start to use them quickly. For example, according to the Director of Human Resources, one of the smaller companies, founded about ten years ago, incorporated the use of co-op workers almost from the outset: "The company started in 1983 and virtually since we started up we've been using co-ops to support our manufacturing and engineering areas." And even firms that have been forced by economic circumstances to give up co-ops hope to return to them, and to return to the practice of hiring their co-op students upon their graduation.
However, while the longevity of co-op programs may explain why there is widespread support for them now, it does not explain why co-op persisted over this long period, or why it expanded from one institution to most of those in the region. The other reasons for the extent of co-op must remain more speculative:
Nationally, co-op has remained relatively small. The greatest expansion has occurred in the last three decades, with the greatest increase coming in community colleges--particularly after the creation of the National Commission for Cooperative Education in 1962 and the publication of its report (Wooldridge, 1987).[3] Partly as a result of this, cooperative education became codified as a form of education with five basic components, as defined in Title III of the Higher Education Act (U.S. Department of Education, 1991b):
The historical and cultural conditions that have caused co-op to be so prevalent in Cincinnati are difficult to replicate, of course; we know of no other community in the country where co-op is so widespread.[4] But for the fledgling school-to-work programs, the characteristics that have helped co-op programs in Cincinnati to endure and to prosper are important because they suggest the conditions necessary for institutionalizing school-to-work programs in this country.
In 1993, we returned to Cincinnati and interviewed other employers, as well as additional representatives from three community colleges in the area, to check the validity of what we had learned earlier and to explore questions we had been unable to address at that time. The employers interviewed were chosen on the basis of information gathered in 1992, as well as through recommendations by community colleges as to which employers had a clear understanding of the use of co-op students or which employers offered different types of co-op experiences. In all, we interviewed 54 individuals representing 46 firms in our first trip to Cincinnati, and 12 individuals representing eight firms in our second trip focused exclusively on co-op programs. In addition, we interviewed 14 individuals from four community colleges on our first trip, and then returned to interview 11 individuals in three colleges. While this study is not a census of co-op in Cincinnati, it does reflect a wide range of employers, in many different sectors, and of varying sizes, as well as the complete set of community colleges in the Cincinnati area.
The one disappointment, described later in greater detail, was our inability to uncover much data about co-op programs because neither community colleges nor employers keep information in forms that are amenable to analysis. Thus our "evaluation" of co-op programs, and their strengths and weaknesses, is purely qualitative and relies on what educators and employers reported. However, the consistency of these reports, from individuals in very different positions with quite different motives, was striking, and supports the validity of our conclusions.
In the next section, we describe the structure of cooperative education in Cincinnati. We then detail the benefits of co-op--for students, educational institutions, and employers--using the words of both educators and employers. The final section offers a number of implications of the Cincinnati experience for school-to-work programs.
[1] Many of these same elements--the need for students to earn money while in college, incongruities in the way students are taught and how they learn--are present today, yet co-op exists in only small pockets throughout the country. While almost 900 colleges report having some sort of co-op program, it is part of the mainstream educational experience for students in only a few places. See especially Stern et al. (1995) and Bragg, Hamm, and Trinkle (1995).
[2] Indeed, we first chose Cincinnati to study after searching for a city where manufacturing was important but where unemployment was relatively low during the 1990-1992 recession.
[3] For additional information on the history of co-op, see Wilson (1978) and Ryder et al. (1987). The National Commission for Cooperative Education was established as a means to continue the growth of co-op throughout educational institutions. It started by studying co-op programs in existence, and published Student Employment and Cooperative Education: Its Growth and Stability, among other reports (as reported in Wooldridge, 1987).
[4] At one other community college--LaGuardia Community College in Queens--co-op is mandatory, as it is in two of the Cincinnati colleges. But while co-op is prevalent at that college, it is certainly not prevalent in the region. The LaGuardia program is quite different from the co-op programs in Cincinnati because it is generally unable to develop high-quality placements because of the local labor market; instead, it places great importance on a series of seminars--the Integrative Seminars--to provide students a forum to convert what seem like low-quality jobs into learning experiences (see Grubb & Badway, 1995). In addition, the New Castle County Vocational-Technical School District in and around Wilmington, Delaware, has a well-developed program of internships and co-op placements for their secondary students, and we suspect that employers there have also widely accepted the practice.