Student enrollment in cooperative education programs in Cincinnati is quite high. At OCAS, all students matriculating towards a degree alternate terms in school and on job sites. The cooperative education program places about 300 different students with 250 employers in co-op positions annually. This represents about 35% of the total day enrollment of about 850. (Evening students, who represent another 500 students, do not enroll in co-op.) Because of the structure of co-op at OCAS--where students typically spend ten weeks in school, followed by ten weeks on the job, alternating schooling and co-op over a two-year period--there are substantially more students placed in co-op each year than graduate; for example, in 1992, there were 94 baccalaureate candidates and 98 Associate degree candidates, all of whom participated in co-op. For the past ten years, over 93% of the graduates wanting full-time employment have reached that goal within the first few weeks following graduation, ranging from a low of 88% (in 1983 and 1984, which were recession years) to a high of 96% (in 1985, 1986, and 1987, all years of substantial economic expansion).[7]
At CTC, during the Winter 1993 term, 531 students were placed in co-op positions; this represents about 21% of the enrollment of full-time students. (Total enrollment is about 5,500; 55% of these are part-time students who are ineligible for co-op.) While co-op is supposedly mandatory at CTC, this requirement is somewhat misleading. According to the co-op coordinators, slightly over half of all enrolled students participate in co-op during any one term. The others fall into different categories: the largest group are enrolled in pre-tech or developmental courses (as described below), and therefore are ineligible for co-op; a large fraction (55%) attend part-time; a small percentage waive out of co-op based on their prior work experience; and some receive some kind of financial aid such as state or federal assistance that precludes them from being hired as co-ops. (College coordinators are quite concerned with this latter group, who often have difficulty completing the programs and finding full-time employment without co-op experience.[8]) The result is that a large fraction of students enrolled are, in effect, ineligible or inappropriate for co-op.
At Sinclair Community College, where co-op is voluntary and often student-initiated, approximately 225 students are involved in co-op each term (about 1,000 students per year). This represents roughly one percent of the average student population of about 21,000 students, the majority of whom (70%) attend part-time. Close to 85% of the co-ops at Sinclair do so in a parallel format, where they take classes in the morning and work part-time in the afternoon. The largest group of co-ops is in the business technologies area, which has an internship requirement. Sinclair co-op coordinators use a data bank of about 500 local employers to find placements for students. In general, Sinclair's co-op program is more traditional--largely voluntary, with a much smaller fraction of students participating, and following a parallel format.
Another way to understand the magnitude of co-op education in Cincinnati's two-year colleges is to consider the size and purpose of these institutions. The two-year colleges in Cincinnati are, by urban standards, relatively small--much smaller than the institutions with enrollments in the order of 25,000 that one finds in many urban areas, including Dayton. Furthermore, because OCAS and CTC are technical institutes with well-defined occupational programs, they probably attract students with relatively clear occupational goals--in contrast to most community colleges, many of whose students are "experimenters" trying to figure out what kinds of careers to follow. Even so, many of the students in OCAS and CTC are part-time students, or evening students, or are completing remedial coursework; the numbers of individuals who are full-time students in occupational programs is therefore relatively small--and these are the individuals most likely to participate in co-op. This represents a kind of selection mechanism for "seriousness," with only those students with a serious commitment to a particular occupational area enrolling in co-op--a point to which we return later in this report on the quality of the co-op program; therefore, the numbers enrolled in co-op may seem small, but they are a large fraction of the seriously committed occupational students.
Yet another way to assess the magnitude of co-op education is to examine the practices of employers. It is difficult to determine how widespread participation in co-op education is among employers in the area, since that would require a survey that no one has undertaken. However, in an earlier study of four local labor markets, including Cincinnati, we interviewed 54 individuals representing 46 firms in the Cincinnati area, chosen at random from firms likely to hire any of six specific occupations,[9] as well as two individuals with broad knowledge of the labor market. All of these firms knew about co-op programs. Of the 35 firms who had participated in co-op at one time or another, only one had discontinued its program, because of a general downsizing, and all of them expressed support for co-op. While the sample of firms interviewed cannot be considered a random sample of employers in the Cincinnati area--since it was chosen to contain six specific sub-baccalaureate occupations, and since small employers were underrepresented--it does reflect a substantial cross-section of employers, and suggests that both the use of co-op students and support for the program is widespread.
In a more recent investigation of co-op education in Cincinnati, we interviewed only employers who were currently employing students in co-op arrangements.[10] These employers' co-op programs ranged in size and scope. The smallest company, with twenty permanent employees and four co-op students, estimated that about one-third of their permanent employees came through as co-op students. One of the larger companies employs over 13,000 employees and about 100 co-op students in ten locations. This company also typically offers permanent positions to a majority of its co-ops upon graduation. This sample of employers cannot be used in any way to reflect the extent of co-op education in Cincinnati, of course, since the firms were chosen for their participation in co-op education; however, this sample does indicate that when firms participate in co-op, they often employ relatively substantial numbers of co-op students and do tend to hire them for permanent employment.
Another way to see the magnitude of two-year college co-op programs is to compare their numbers with the numbers employed. There are about 830 co-op students per year placed from the two two-year colleges in Cincinnati. In 1990, there were about 359,000 individuals ages 20-64 in Harris County (where Cincinnati is located), of whom roughly one quarter (24.3%; about 87,000 individuals) had some college. The number of new hires might have been in the neighborhood of 2,200,[11] and so it is plausible that one-third to two-fifths of new hires at the sub-baccalaureate level came from co-op programs. Over a period of time, such a pattern would obviously result in a considerable fraction of the workforce being knowledgeable about co-op programs. Furthermore, several of the large and prominent firms in Cincinnati have made extensive use of co-op, further contributing to its reputation.
Current state support for co-op comes in the form of reimbursement for students even while on the job; that is, students are enrolled and the colleges continue to receive state funding, through the regular mechanisms of state aid to community colleges, for students during their work terms. These funds go into the colleges' general funds, though they tend to be used to support the additional costs associated with providing co-op--especially the costs of hiring co-op coordinators, as well as the marginal costs (in some cases) of having to offer courses more frequently to accommodate students on co-op schedules. The importance of this funding mechanism is that co-op programs have a stable funding base, rather than having to rely on grants, contributions from employers, or other special funds that can dry up.
Even within one relatively small geographic area, co-op programs take many forms. In this section we describe the structural differences among co-op programs, how they are initiated and organized, the processes of selecting students, the factors that contribute to quality, and the potential roles that state and federal governments might play in fostering work-based learning.
The alternating model of co-op is generally considered the classic model: It is highly centralized, usually does not award credit, and may require little direct involvement of the teaching faculty. According to the literature, it tends to function best in professional areas of study and in fields with large numbers of students. The parallel program, as defined in the Higher Education Act, involves "periods of both classroom study and monitored and supervised public or private employment of a student in a cooperative education project, with the student carrying a half-time academic courseload and working about 20 hours per week in a cooperative education work experience." Parallel co-op shares many of the features of work-study or less organized work experiences. There have been adaptations to the cooperative education model by institutions to fit their own conditions; however, the characteristics of alternating and parallel forms are fairly constant.
The most common form of co-op in Cincinnati is the alternating model. It is considered a more intensive learning experience for students since at any one time their focus is not split between school and work. Typically, a student goes to school for a 10- or 13-week term, and then works with an employer for the same amount of time, repeating this cycle two to six times. At OCAS and CTC, almost all co-op students follow this pattern. At Sinclair, however, the majority of the arrangements (90%) are parallel. One coordinator said that most of the employers there prefer parallel to alternating programs. However, work positions in a parallel program may not necessarily last the same period of time as a school term; therefore, students sometimes work at a part-time job year-round, but apply for co-op credit for it during a particular term. Because Sinclair is set up to facilitate parallel programs, students in areas that typically have alternating programs (such as engineering) encounter difficulties in sequencing their coursework when they choose to co-op in alternating terms.
The choice between alternating and parallel models is also related to the characteristics of students. Those in the alternating model are required to attend courses full-time during the school term and to work full-time during the work term. Parallel students at Sinclair can attend part-time and work part-time. Thus, the part-time students typically enrolled at many community colleges are better able to participate in parallel co-op, and can continue to earn a living while enrolled in classes. In general, however, the alternating program has been cited as more beneficial because of its stronger link between students and communities, especially at community colleges (Wooldridge, 1987). While the lack of data prevented us from ascertaining the advantage of one over the other in terms of long-term outcomes, Cincinnati employers tended to prefer alternating co-ops. They reported that students were more focused, since their energies were not split when they alternated work and school terms. In addition, employers thought that it gave students a welcome break from school.
On the other hand, one firm that tends to use alternating co-ops also hires two groups of parallel students to work four hours a day throughout the year on special projects; thus, the company gets complete coverage and students continue their school work as well. They cite continuity as an advantage to the parallel approach since projects can be longer than 10 weeks. As one manager stated,
They [students in parallel programs] are somebody you can depend on all year long and they get a lot of small projects that can be done in half a day. You never have a change with a parallel.In contrast, employers with alternating arrangements usually hire two students into one position, so that the position is always covered when a student returns to school; but this involves some discontinuity between the two individuals.
An added challenge to alternating programs is the issue of sequencing courses so that students are able to enroll in appropriate classes. OCAS and CTC reported added costs to offering the same courses each term in order to accommodate the schedules of students in alternating work placements. As one co-op administrator mentioned,
In an alternating program, such as the one we have, the courses must be taught twice, unless the same courses are taught in the summer and the fall and the same courses are taught in the spring and the winter. So the cost to just teach the courses is about 25% greater.Students attending institutions like Sinclair that are less committed to alternating co-op must struggle to get the right courses in their school term, or end up arranging co-op positions based on course offerings instead of appropriate job positions.
In parallel programs the distinction between part-time work, of the sort that most community colleges students have, and co-op experience is often unclear. The relatedness between what students study and their co-op positions seemed somewhat loose at Sinclair. There, coordinators sometimes relied on the notion that any work at all might be educative. As one mentioned about an unrelated position, "It's a job; they're learning important skills about what it means to be a worker."
However, alternating co-op placements are quite unlike part-time work and informal work experience programs, on the one hand, and conventional clinical teaching, on the other; the extensive placement in actual work settings creates the difference. The experiences of the nursing program at CTC--one of only a few in the country in which students participate in cooperative education--illustrates the difference between a clinical experience, a "sheltered experience," and a co-op placement where an individual is responsible for a job. As the coordinator stated the difference,
Clinical experience tends to be a sheltered experience. There is always an instructor present physically in the environment who is responsible for the students. As a co-op employee, the nursing student is functioning within a job description for which they're prepared.
Cooperative education is decentralized at CTC by division. There are three divisions--business, engineering technology, and health--each involving a department chair and four or five co-op coordinators. Co-op placement officers in each of the three divisions are responsible for matching students with appropriate work experiences. The coordinators' roles include soliciting employers for jobs, assisting students with their résumés and interviewing skills, and visiting students on the job once each term to evaluate the quality of work experience as well as student performance. Coordinators have a case load of students, and typically place between 30 and 60 students per term. This decentralized system allows coordinators to specialize in broad occupational areas and to work consistently with certain industries, thus building up strong relationships with employers in the area.
Another advantage of decentralized co-op is that it allows coordinators to develop strong ties to faculty in their occupational areas. For example, in the Business Division at CTC, four of the six coordinators were formerly instructional faculty, and they maintain close working relationships with the current instructional faculty. Because of their specialization, coordinators can draw on prior experience in the industries for which they place students; for example, the coordinator in the culinary program is well connected with hotels and restaurants in the area. The dean of the division felt strongly that the decentralized organization made for a better program:
There is still debate in this institution whether that's efficient, whether it would be nice if we had centralized co-op. I like it where my coordinators are part of the cluster so they get to know who the students are. . . . Let's use the big debate--we have some old typewriters. Do we get rid of our old typewriters and put in computers? Will we go out and buy $12,000 worth of new typewriters? Well our coordinators have been saying, in the uniqueness of Cincinnati, they [students] still need to have typing skills. They still need to understand what a typewriter does. So that's input that my coordinator can put into that area back there. If they were part of a centralized office and didn't have the avenue to make that input, they may run out and buy computers when our co-op employers are still saying we want our students to understand and be able to work on a typewriter.Another advantage cited for decentralized co-ops involves the opportunity for close relationships between students and coordinators. In the Engineering Technology Division, for example, placement for students completing the program is done informally but relies on the connections between the co-op coordinator and the business community. As one coordinator said,
We know who the students are. We go through and match up résumés with what the employers are looking for when they call us. So it's a very specific type of résumé referral and a lot of them like it. They depend on us. Now and then we do interviewing skills, job search workshops, and we have some materials that we prepare and give the students. The other divisions do not do it. In business, it kind of varies on programs. Some of the coordinators will work with grads; some won't. In health, I think their grads probably are placed so easily, and it kind of takes care of itself. So it varies and that's one of the differences [between centralized and decentralized co-op and/or placement offices].There are also disadvantages to decentralized co-op operations such as duplication of effort and potential for increased costs. Duplication might involve the development of strong relationships with employers who hire from more than one division, as well as some administrative functions involved in coordination.
In contrast, co-op is centralized at OCAS through the Professional Practice and Career Placement Center. Co-op and permanent job listings are available, as are extensive resource materials on job search strategies, résumé writing tips, and information on area employers. Two professional coordinators and support staff operate the center. Students must enroll in a professional development course, work with either of the two placement officers to develop their résumés, and apply for positions listed in the office. The interview with an employer may take place at the center or off-campus. At OCAS, approximately five hundred students are placed in co-op jobs with about 180 employers each year. The relationship between the two co-op coordinators and the instructional faculty is quite strong; the director of the placement center is a department head and, as such, meets regularly with other department heads. The co-op placement function is considered to be integrated with the academic programs and because of this the centralized organization strengthens rather than detracts from the programs. As the director stated,
If they want to change curriculum I sit on the curriculum committee. When we have advisory board meetings, they attend ours and we attend theirs and so on. So we have a very integrated relationship.However, because there are approximately 30 full-time faculty, and many more part-time instructors, each co-op coordinator needs to work with a large number of faculty from a variety of occupations.
Sinclair is significantly different in its approach. Co-op is centrally coordinated in the Experience Based Education Department of the Extended Learning and Human Services Division. The cluster within Experience Based Education includes programs such as College Without Walls, Credit for Lifelong Learning, Associate of Individualized Study, Associate of Technical Study, and Cooperative Education. Four coordinators work to find positions for students, work with students on résumés and career exploration, and coordinate with professors to grant students credit. Students at Sinclair tend to co-op in a parallel program, which makes placement efforts more complicated and ongoing. As stated earlier, co-op is organized at Sinclair like other auxiliary services; it is an additional option for students, not a central component of their program.
The quality of the co-op experience for a student is substantially affected by how the work is organized. At some firms, students rotate through different departments in order to learn more about the company. At one large company, for example, students' assignments change considerably, depending upon openings and the students' preferences. As the personnel director explained,
Many students will want to stay in one location because they've become familiar with the supervisor. And the supervisor will give them much more challenging projects if they know them and they want them to come back, and the students get excited about what they're working on.Many employers also design the co-op placements by what they want students to learn. One employer described the purpose of co-op as follows:
They learn the academic skills at college. One of the first things, the most beneficial, is they learn to work as a team in co-op. Because when you're in college you're working by yourself, against yourself, competing. But the first thing you learn is to be a team when you come here. And that is so important because in the past people never taught that. And we really emphasize it now; it's all team work, team building. They are expected to learn to be able to take risks, leadership skills, all those normal things that I think you expect.The larger companies, which tend to view co-op as a recruitment process and a way of "growing their own" employees, tend to move co-ops around to different parts of the company more often. In some cases, co-op students are in small training groups that move among various divisions. One particular firm, which is committed to co-ops as long-term investments, purposely moves students around different positions because it provides better training for the long term. As one manager stated,
Every supervisor and every manager is far better at doing what it takes to give them the skills to grow. And from day one, our supervisor is a man who has been taught that co-ops are the seeds of our future. And that the co-op period is a time where we provide the fertilizer. We give them the training. We open the doors. We give the opportunity for experience and if we do that properly we will be able to be successful five, ten, fifteen years down the road because we will have developed the kind of people that will have the ability to continue to grow in the company beyond a couple years after graduation.At other firms--particularly those that view co-ops as an immediate source of low-cost, high-quality labor rather than a source of "growing their own" employees[12]--co-op students may stay in one department for multiple work terms. At some firms, in-depth training in one area provides the student with high quality experience that transfers to other areas; at other firms, unfortunately, students who worked in one area might get fairly narrow firm-specific training. At two of the smaller companies where students tended to work in particular jobs, there were some attempts to present general information about the company. However, this kind of activity was comparatively rare in firms that kept co-op students in one position.
In addition, at firms where students have a variety of placements, managers may arrange special seminars for co-ops to be exposed to varying phases of the business. At a larger company, a manager responsible for a number of co-ops recently decided to extended their education beyond the engineering area by setting up a forum with the executive vice president of finance in order to expose students to "all phases of the business." Students were given the opportunity to ask questions and learn more about the company. Another large employer, which hires 80 to 100 co-op students each term, has a number of activities for students including a co-op newsletter, social functions, and informative seminars. They do this for two primary reasons: (1) co-ops tend to work in isolated parts of the company and (2) the firm has an older workforce. The company wants co-ops to feel welcome and included, and therefore goes to great lengths to integrate them into company activities. The practices of moving students to different positions in a firm, and of providing seminars to teach them more about "all phases of the business," are reminiscent of the option in vocational education programs of learning about "all aspects of the industry" in order to provide a broader form of workforce preparation.
In still other cases, firms develop a partnership with local colleges in ways other than hiring co-op students. As one employer described the relationship,
We recently had a partnership day with a technical college, and the heads of the departments and the placement officers and some of the teachers 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 more like "how can we help you develop your students."In general, we found that firms using cooperative education as a way of "growing their own" employees tended more often to rotate students around positions and to provide seminars, other learning experiences, and ancillary activities with the local college. This is consistent with an explicitly educational view of co-op, with an emphasis on the firm's contribution to the student's learning and growth. As one employer in such a firm stated,
The student is a student at all times. We are part of the education process. We provide training, we provide exposure, we provide ability to practice. They are most valuable when they graduate. Therefore, they get moved around to different assignments, receive wide exposure.
[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.