[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.
[5] We included Sinclair because it was frequently mentioned as a source of employees by Cincinnati's employers. In addition, the contrast between Sinclair, with a more traditional co-op program involving a small fraction of students, and those at OCAS and CTC, with mandatory co-op following an alternative pattern, is illuminating.
[6] Great Oaks has two co-op programs that alternative periods of school and work, one in the area of automotive technicians, enrolling perhaps 32-36 students a year, and another in electro-mechanical maintenance with about 8 students. While a number of other programs provide some work experience, they are not extensive enough to be considered co-op programs.
[7] These statistics are taken from OCAS Professional Practice and Career Placement Reports for 1991 and 1992.
[8] A special problem involves the various income-conditioned programs available to students. Low-income students--including many minority students--may be eligible for Pell grants, or AFDC; but they are likely to earn enough as a co-op student so that they become ineligible for the grant, in effect forcing them to choose between co-op and a grant. In addition, JTPA clients may be made ineligible by the amount of employment they have in co-op. The problem in this case is that what is intended as an educational experience is treated by other federal programs as simply a form of employment; a change in eligibility procedures and earnings calculations would be necessary to give co-op programs special status.
[9] See Grubb et al. (1992). The six occupations were electronics technicians, machinist, drafter, accountant, business occupations, and computer-related occupations. The important point is that this earlier study did not select firms according to the presence or absence of co-op education.
[10] Those interviewed included individuals from human resource divisions. In a few firms, we interviewed the vice president for operations or the manager in charge of the co-op program.
[11] If individuals work for about 40 years, and there is a rectangular distribution of years in the workforce, then 2.5% of a workforce will be new hires each year. With an expanding workforce, the fraction of new hires will be somewhat higher, though in practice there has been expansion and contraction at different periods in the past and the proportion of new hires surely varies a great deal.
[12] The "grow your own" approach tends to develop a broader range of competencies, comparable to the broadly transferable skills of the "learn and go" model profiled by Stern and Rahn (1994), while co-ops as a source of immediate labor are similar to the more specific training of the "learn and stay" model.
[13] At Sinclair Community College, the co-op coordinators have the double challenge of recruiting students in addition to employers because of the voluntary nature of co-op there.
[14] Co-op programs are amenable to numerous variations. For example, one college has an arrangement with an employer who employs numerous co-op students, but contracts with the college to pay them so students do not appear on the firm's payroll. This is a company which has gone through major restructuring involving extensive layoffs. The company chose to arrange it this way in order to report fewer workers on their books.
[15] As part of the general lack of data, we were unable to obtain any information about such effects.
[16] However, most students continue to co-op when they transfer. Surprisingly, there is little problem transferring from the two-year to the four-year program, even when it involves switching institutions. As the coordinator stated, "It really isn't that big of a deal to transfer; it's just a matter of working the classes out and the credits out accordingly with the counselors."
[17] In the language of school-to-work programs, this involves the consistency between work-based and school-based components and the strength of connecting activities.
[18] The nursing program at CTC offered a different type of seminar for students; it was taken concurrently with the co-op term with the intention of helping students integrate what they were learning on the job with their coursework and intended career. Students were encouraged to reflect on their co-op experience, its relation to coursework, and implications for their career path.
[19] See also the discussion of the high-skills equilibrium by Finegold and Soskice (1988).
[20] After rapid expansion of cooperative education, questions of effectiveness, relevance, and overall definition came to the forefront. Some of these pressing questions were asked in the 1978 monograph, Developing and Expanding Cooperative Education (Wilson, 1978), including, What is cooperative education really? How is a viable program of cooperative education designed and implemented? What are the functions and roles of a co-op coordinator? Under what conditions, if at all, is degree credit for co-op justified? How does co-op relate to other campus-based forms of nontraditional or experiential education? These questions were intended to drive program improvement efforts, and to inspire dialogue about cooperative education. However, there has been relatively little sophisticated evaluation of co-op programs.
[21] These responses are consistent with the findings of Bragg et al. (1995), who determined from a survey of co-op programs that they would recommend more incentives for employers to participate and increased promotion of work-based education. The number-one recommendation in this survey was, not surprisingly, the call for more resources for two-year colleges--an issue that is less serious in Cincinnati because of the availability of state funding.
[22] In other communities we have examined, employers have been suspicious of job training programs because they include many undereducated and unmotivated individuals (Grubb et al., 1992). We suspect that any effort to enroll large numbers of job training clients in co-op programs might cause resistance from employers.
[23] It has been difficult to find statistical evidence of the effectiveness of co-op education; see, for example, Stern, Finkelstein, Urquiloa, and Cagampang (forthcoming). A recent review of the earnings effects by Somers (1994) found most studies to be poorly controlled, and that many of the studies found co-op to have no effect on earnings; one of the best-controlled studies, of graduates from Michigan State engineering programs, found an effect on earnings of only 1.9%. All of the studies cited were from four-year colleges, however, and most of them examined earnings directly after college. Wessels and Pumphrey (1995) reviewed a number of studies finding little influence of co-op on the length of initial job search and advancement. They then examined the employment of graduates of community colleges in the North Carolina system and found that individuals placed with their co-op employers have a reduced search time for their first job, and that co-op graduates report more job advancements, suggesting that the benefits of co-op may emerge only after a number of years. The students from these community college co-op programs are also more likely to report that employers are making use of the skills they learned in college. Overall, however, the empirical literature that exists is quite mixed in its support for the effects of co-op.
[24] The other local labor markets we examined included Fresno, Sacramento, and the Silicon Valley/San Jose area (also analyzed by Useem, 1986). Of course, this was not a census of local labor markets, so there may be others with close working relationships between employers and education providers. However, the weak ties between the two are structural, rooted in the differences between the kinds of institutions that firms are and the characteristics of educational institutions. It, therefore, requires substantial effort--of the kind that co-op programs represent--to bridge this gap.
[25] A difficult question that merits further examination is whether employers sometimes use co-op students as an alternative to permanent employees--much as they are now moving to temporary or contingent labor as a way of avoiding paying benefits and hiring and firing over the business cycle. None of the employers or educators mentioned this possibility, however.
[26] An obvious but difficult research task would be to ascertain the long-run employment benefits of these two types of co-op or school-to-work programs--assuming that the two could be differentiated in the first place.
[27] While the GAO report concentrated on high school programs, these barriers are discussed in the literature on college co-op as well (Harsher et al., 1987).
[28] In asking employers about what state and federal policies could advance work-based education, we consistently probed about the value of skill standards. While it is impossible to prove that such mechanisms would not be useful from the responses of individuals who don't use them, the lack of support for skill standards and certificates of mastery (or other credentials aside from the associate degree) was uniform and striking.
[29] The lack of any visible form of institutionalization was one of the most surprising aspects of Cincinnati's co-op programs. We asked persistently about mechanisms of institutional or bureaucratic control at a level larger than any one college or company, but were unable to find any.
[30] However, they appear to work independently of one another; that is, there is no regional organization of co-op coordinators or those committed to co-op education, to share practices or promote co-op in a wider sense.
[31] Indeed, it may be that even the rule-bound German system is more dependent on unstated cultural norms than most of us realized. As David Finegold (1995) concluded about the German model, "It is not possible to transplant this system--which evolved from the medieval craft guilds, and thus grounded in a long tradition of respect and reward for skilled, manual careers--without the deep structural and cultural roots that support it" (p. 5).
[32] In postsecondary institutions, there has been a constant process of "institutional drift" in which area vocational schools initially devoted to secondary and postsecondary students, evolve into technical institutes offering certificate and associate degrees, and then become comprehensive community colleges by adding academic degrees. The most recent stage in this "drift" is the attempt by some community colleges to become baccalaureate-granting institutions by grafting another two years onto their programs. "Institutional drift" is testimony to the status of academic over vocational goals and of the baccalaureate degree over sub-baccalaureate credentials.