In Cincinnati, however, a clear pattern emerged: While acknowledging that they want good academic students, employers emphasized the "softer" personal competencies more than anything. Many talked about the student's personality traits such as enthusiasm, ability to work with others, and a general sense of team work. Eagerness was more important than perfect grades. The notion that personal attributes might be lacking in a student with perfect grades was repeated by a few of the employers who stated that they would rather hire someone who is well-rounded. Typical comments included the following:
Usually we look at a 2.8 or a 3.0 or better. But I don't necessarily go for the 4.0 student either. Those people may be absolutely the academic person, studious, but as far as people skills, the communication is weak, the personal skills are not there, and for the supervisors it does not appeal to them. They are not necessarily looking for that. It's the communication skills. So I think that's important. And if they have the 4.0 along with it, fine. It's basically the students' eagerness; they [the managers] don't look real hard at the background, they look at the eagerness, their adaptability, how flexible they think they can be.While many of the companies expressed an interest in the younger, traditional college-aged student, almost all described hiring older students as well. One company representative said they like to hire students who have had careers in the military, or who had other experiences that had strengthened their commitment to work. At a small manufacturing company, the personality characteristics of older students such as dependability and stability seemed most important:
Our greatest success has been in the two-year environment with older students that have graduated from high school, gone out in the job market, decided they didn't like what they were doing, and wanted to make a change so they're invested in their future and going to school to do that. Those folks tend to be more serious. Sometimes they're married and have a family and those kind of responsibilities. And they turn out to be very good, have good work ethics, very committed, very motivated. Sometimes, and particularly in the last few years we've noticed, the kids coming right out of high school into the two-year type of environment, two-year trade school--their work ethic has been a little bit different than we've seen in the past. It's basically a "what are you going to do for me" attitude as opposed to looking at their job as "what can I get out of this to further my career?"Another company felt it was important to know what the student was interested in:
Maturity, grades. We look in the first quarter because a lot of time they've been in school for a quarter or two and they've never done anything but work at McDonald's or cut grass or took odd jobs. We really look at interests to see what kind of things they do as hobbies. To see how closely what they're taking in school lines up with the kinds of things they enjoy doing.There was also an emphasis on the student as a whole person; well-roundness was attractive to employers. A human resources representative stated the characteristics of a successful candidate:
They generally are comfortable in different environments. Not just the shop environment, but they're comfortable in here as well. They are also academically high, not necessarily the A students, but a B or a solid C+ student . . . Attitude is important. We really look for people who can be a team player and I know that gets overworked, but what we simply mean is that they're going to have to take a little harassment, a little bit of hazing, those kind of things . . . So personality is important.These employer preferences complement the screening criteria that the college establish. While the colleges have established GPA and/or test score requirements, and do not accept casual students into co-op, their criteria do not encompass the personal attributes that employers look for. But employers do screen for these attributes and--to the extent that they rely on co-op coordinators to help them with their screening--they communicate their preferences to the colleges as well. The result is that co-op students are likely to be screened for a broad set of competencies including basic academic abilities, specific occupational competencies taught in the college program, and the personal attributes that are so important to employers.
Our coordinators, they're faculty members but they also work closely with the teaching faculty and they're very familiar with the different programs and the curriculum requirements and changes that happen. So there is that communication and that's part of the advantage of us being in the department as opposed to like a centralized co-op office. So we work closely with all the teaching faculty. . . . We have identified certain key skills that the students are developing. . . . [W]e have advisory committees for each program, and industry representatives to identify needs and how those skills can match with employers' needs.At Sinclair, faculty are involved as advisors to co-op students. These select faculty are paid to oversee the co-op experience, visit the student, and assign a grade. This activity is treated as an independent study project on the part of the faculty member, and rarely involves the instructor designing the work component.
With very few exceptions, work assignments are completely in the control of the employer, with little college influence. As one employer put it,
They're so happy to have these kids get some on-site experience that they are very good about not invading the work issues themselves.The exception to this involvement tended to be when the school co-op coordinator thought the student was being used inappropriately--for example, doing janitorial work instead of learning about engineering. These examples were few, but both employers and educators were conscious of the possibility of upsetting the balance.
In Professional Development 1, they learn about what is available, the kinds of careers that are available with their degree. They learn about how to enter those. They learn about the components of those. So they are a little better prepared to do some of that [selection of positions] on their own. In the first quarter of the year, they have to take this course, and as part of the research in the course, they have to write their résumé and research a company. But we also have employers come in to talk with them and we give them opportunities to talk with employers outside the employment context, more as an information gathering kind of thing. We also have them talk with alumni, find out what they're doing and how they got their jobs, what was required, all of that. So they do have quite a bit of research that they've done that way and then when an employer actually indicates interest and is coming here to interview, we make sure that all kinds of literature is available.These seminars therefore provide an arena for students to explore workplace expectations and culture, and to orient them to the way of the world as well. For example, brochures in the Business Division at CTC offer the following "suggestions for being a successful co-op":
We just don't take what isn't a good student. So I guess through years of experience of working with us they [the college] know that we're not going to take a warm body, that we'd do without.Another individual acknowledged that she has seen companies use co-ops to do low-level work, but to the detriment of the program. Her previous firm used co-op students to make copies of blue prints, rather than learn to draw them; as a result, the quality of student decreased. When she was promoted and tried to improve the program, it took some convincing to get good students back.
Another employer attributed the high-quality equilibrium to both the students and the college program itself, though admitting that they would accept particularly outstanding students even from mediocre programs:
It's the quality of the students coming out and it's also the quality of the co-op program at that college, it really is. Many of the reasons you're asking, "why do I select the universities I do," it's the same reason for saying no. Oh yes, we might try some schools here and there, different ones, and we might have a student, and the student is very good and the co-op program is very bad, but they were referred for a reason. The students are good and we won't say well just no, because the program is not any good.Once the high-quality equilibrium is established, it creates its own incentives for each side to maintain quality; otherwise students will not enroll and employers will not provide jobs. A co-op administrator described the motivation 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.
The high-quality equilibrium in Cincinnati is almost surely a factor in the popularity and longevity of co-op education. Elsewhere in the education and training system, various "low-quality equilibria" have evolved, in which jobs of low quality, pay, and status are matched with students or clients with few skills, little education, and insubstantial experience--for example, in the work experience programs that proliferated in high schools during the 1970s; in the job training programs funded by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) and by welfare-to-work programs; and in the Department of Labor's Employment Service. These are low-status, marginal programs that--whatever benefits they may generate for individuals in them--would never be promoted among employers in the ways that the Cincinnati co-op programs are. The obvious implication is that school-to-work programs also need to establish mechanisms to ensure a high-quality equilibrium.
The procedures for evaluating co-op programs in Cincinnati are fairly consistent. Typically, employers complete evaluation forms provided by the educational institution concerning individual students. At some companies, an in-house evaluation is conducted in addition to the one the school requires. The college representative use these evaluations to assign the student credit for their co-op term, and in some cases to assign a grade. Employers often use the evaluation to determine if they should ask the student back for another work term.
At one of the larger companies, which intends to hire full-time permanent employees from their co-op pool, the evaluation is more extensive:
When a student comes to us and they're in their first assignment we do a mid-term evaluation. And it's discussed with the supervisor and the student, and that gives the student a chance to change or alter performance of some of the things they're doing. And at the end of the term, there is an informal evaluation. It's a review with the student and it is signed by the real manager and the vice president of operations so he or she can see the type or level of the work assignments, and the type of students we have. And we have on that form, "does this person have potential for full-time employment?" And you'll say "too soon to evaluate, yes or no." And so I can monitor. If after the second assignment or third, it's saying "too soon to evaluate," then I know I've got to go in there and find out what's going on because really you should be able to know after two assignments. And then that form, of course, is returned to the college and then each term thereafter they're evaluated.Another company's representative stressed that the evaluation process focuses on the student's experience as much as on what the company gains:
At the conclusion of each term, it's a sit-down session. Some of the programs here they ask the co-ops to keep a diary and do a report. And so it's just a give and take back and forth. But it's done by the manager. They sit down with the manager. And then our department [human resources] does an exit interview as well. And the purpose of the exit interview is an outsider coming in and saying, "How was your experience? Do you know what you're going to do the next time? Or is the program right? Are things going well? What are some of your successes? and things like that." So it's a two-step process, done by the manager and then done as an exit interview type thing by our department.How employers evaluate the overall effectiveness of the co-op program is less clear. For the most part, the companies base their continued use of co-ops on anecdotal history and on general good feelings. They can identify clear benefits to having co-ops, as we review in the next section, but rarely have data to back up their statements. One exception is a large firm with an extensive program and a long history of hiring co-op students. They have conducted in-depth cost-benefit analyses, with the assistance of one of the local co-op coordinators, to determine the value of their program. They found that co-ops cost them money in the first term, but pay for themselves after the second term. In addition, there are considerable cost savings to using co-op as a recruiting mechanism, and co-op students who come to work for the company after graduation tend to be more productive and more content employees. In eight of the eleven reporting organizations surveyed for their study, co-op education was found to be cost effective at the student employment level. In addition, the report shows co-op students to be 73% more cost effective over the first 21 months of full-time employment (Abel & Love, 1988).
Many of the employers and co-op coordinators expressed an interest in additional evaluation and data collection. Yet resources of time and money have precluded them from developing better evaluations. One company found that having preliminary data from an evaluation saved their program when the firm went through dramatic changes:
We should keep records. I mean you should, every five years or so evaluate the program and see where you are. But what happened, [our company] went through a rightsizing. Rightsizing is not getting rid of people, it's making sure you're doing the right things and doing them right. And we had to make presentations, and we did eliminate some of the activities where we felt we could be doing something else. When I made that presentation for all this, I wanted to give them statistics and the questions they were asking is "how many people have you hired in the last 10 years?" "What is the retention of those people?" We had all that in the database, and you can just plug it in. And that was very important in keeping the program, that we had good data.Like employers, the colleges tended not to have formal evaluation mechanisms in place. While basic statistics are kept regarding the number of students and employers involved each year, very little data is collected beyond that. There is certainly an interest in knowing more about their students' experience, as well as how to improve their programs, but resources are unavailable to answer those questions. The lack of adequate information about these co-op programs reflects the weak state of institutional research in community colleges generally.
What do employers want from the state or federal government to encourage them to hire co-ops? The employers in Cincinnati tended to mention activities that included promotion and advertising, wage subsidies, and special categorization for employee status.[21]
A number of employers suggested the state take on a greater role in promoting the benefits of co-op to employers and colleges. Employers and educators alike stressed the importance of getting the word out about co-op; as one employer commented about his priorities:
I have probably different wants and desires than the colleges do. I want to get co-op publicized. I mean I want it to be a way of life in everything we do. I'm not asking for money because we don't need the money to run the program at [my company]. That's not what we're looking for. I just want it to get the recognition of how important it is, give us a chance to get out there and show them. And I strongly support the colleges. I want to make sure those colleges have enough money for enough professors so that the students can get all the classes they need. And that's what bothers me is that if the money is not there, then they cannot have full-time, year-round school so that students can get their college classes in the summer time.In terms of funding for co-op programs, state support for the community college portion seems to be adequate; at least, there were few complaints about insufficient funding. However, the notion of providing some funding for the employer component--either directly, or through a wage subsidy--was raised consistently, though there were two distinct camps of employers. Some were not interested in wage subsidies, or said that subsidies would have little effect on their current co-op programs; while others were eager to have this incentive. Those on the side of more government funding included a small employer who thought that his company would hire more co-ops if there were financial incentives to do so, as well as a large company which experienced a significant reduction in their workforce due to corporate downsizing--suggesting that size is not the only distinguishing feature of those wanting more financial incentives. (The latter company does not hire co-ops as permanent employees anymore upon graduation, and thus uses co-ops as cost-efficient labor.) The former company felt that, as a small firm, they might hire more co-ops if there were financial incentives to do so:
It would be great to see some tax abatement or something like that. Again for a small company particularly, I think it would encourage us to use it more. And if it helps offset some costs, we might be able to use moreOne employer suggested a subsidy for students rather than companies, in essence a loan forgiveness program for students who co-op:
co-ops.
Don't pay us, pay the student. I'm not looking for money specifically but if we all had to pay let's say four or five dollars instead of seven or whatever it is, the government would pick up the difference; it would be easier for us to have more co-op positions. For instance, if the student came in with their own training dollars from the government. In other words, I don't want to be involved necessarily [in a] "give it to us, we give it to them" type of thing but rather the government helps the student. And I think the government could look at ways like that to help themselves as opposed to "we'll loan it to you when you come back later" type thing. We hope that certainly the government could help some colleges and universities, I think, in terms of helping their labs; they really could have more up-to-date equipment. Right now, much of it falls on private industry [to provide equipment].One particular aspect of funding mentioned by several educators (not employers) involves federal funding for students most in need--those eligible for job training programs provided by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) and welfare programs. In the past, such individuals have been eligible for federal grants and loans, especially Pell grants for low-income students, enabling them to enroll in postsecondary institutions with a combination of job training funds, student grants, and the regular state subsidies to postsecondary education. However, in an effort to reduce what some have interpreted as "double-dipping," Congress proposed eliminating job training clients from the Pell grant program. This caused one co-op representative to complain:
I still think the number one problem with co-op, not only the state, but the federal, is the students who are on welfare, AFDC, Pell grants. We're fighting an argument now with the federal government whether a student is a full-time student if they're on a Pell grant or not. I think it would be nice if the federal government and the state government encouraged students to co-op and not discouraged them. And they discourage them by wanting to cut aid, by wanting to take them off grants. And it tells the student "I don't really want you to co-op." Well it continues to make that student a tax liability instead of a tax asset. . . . I think that the state and the federal government makes it too difficult for the students to co-op.In general, however, there do not seem to be large numbers of JTPA or welfare clients in co-op programs, and no systematic effort to enroll them;[22] we suspect that a few such individuals find their way into co-op through the mechanism known as individual referral, where clients can chose their own education or training program.
A third government role that employers mentioned involved the re-employment status of co-op students. Ohio does not consider students working while enrolled, whether in an alternating or parallel program, to be employees eligible for unemployment compensation or workman's compensation. This fact was cited by employers and co-op coordinators alike as helping make the programs work so well. As one manager stated,
What the state does for us right now is, they do not consider co-ops employees. So if we or the co-op terminate the employment relationship, we're not liable for unemployment. That's a big deal. A change in that would change our attitude towards our co-op program.That is, employers and educators alike want to maintain the flexibility of co-op as something different from a conventional employment relationship, with fewer penalties if a co-op student does not work out. This reflects in part the view of co-op as a "try-out" relationship, in which students and employers alike are testing their preferences and the match between employer and employee.
While neither employers nor educators consistently cited any other ways in which governments might help foster co-op programs, it is clear that there are substantial resources required to operate successful programs. The colleges need a staff of co-op coordinators and--in states that do not continue to support co-op students thorough normal state aid--these would need to be funded from special monies. In addition, the costs of smaller class sizes, sometimes necessary for students on alternating programs, and of special seminars need to be considered. Many employers in Cincinnati are willing to bear the costs of their own coordinators, since they recognize the long-term benefits of "growing their own" employees and of recruiting high-ability workers, but in the short run, many firms in other regions of the country may not be persuaded of the need for such resources--particularly for small companies that rarely hire, or in economic recessions, or in regions of the country with depressed economic conditions. Therefore the comments of Cincinnati providers about the role of governments in fostering work-based learning might not be applicable in other places which lack its long tradition of co-op education.
[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.