Co-op Education in US Colleges

At more than a thousand U.S. colleges and universities there is in place a somewhat more formalized and systematic plan for part-time employment called cooperative education. Under this plan, on some campuses referred to as the Earn/Learn Program, the institution arranges in advance for a number of work positions, helps place qualified students in these jobs, then monitors the work of the college students throughout the semester or the year.

For the student, co-op can lead to a nice career move later while serving as an immediate financial lifesaver. The program virtually guarantees those in it a work experience in an area related to their major. The pay is typically better than is available in most part-time jobs. (In 1988, at the University of South Carolina, for example, humanities and social sciences students average about $5 per hour on co-op jobs, while those in engineering and computer science majors were earning an average of $13 per hour.) The co-op program seems to work well for the various employers, too, in that they don’t need to spend so much money recruiting. They can always arrange to get bright, able people on board (even on a seasonal basis), and, significantly, they can spot new talent for long-term commitments later. Co-op seems to benefit the institution, too, in that it makes the participating students more easily marketable after graduation.

This is not a new program; co-op arrangements were made as early as 1906. An engineering professor at Cincinnati, Herman Schneider, realized that his students were well grounded in theory but lacked practical experience. He persuaded various companies to employ his students for a time. When they returned to the classroom, he found, they brought back additional maturity and real-world expertise with them. Since then, more than 300,000 students have been placed in co-op jobs, and their earnings have made co-op education in a billion-dollar industry.

Individual co-op arrangements vary. Some employers prefer to employ students for three consecutive semesters, 15 to 20 hours a week. At this rate, a student can take a normal class load. Other co-op jobs may dictate that you take off for a semester or so and work a normal 40-hour week.

There are opportunities for travel. The General Accounting Office, for example, regularly dispatches its co-op students to Florida, Chicago, and New York from central headquarters in Washington. The FBI, CIA, and other government agencies, as well as literally thousands of companies and nonprofit organizations, utilize college students on a co-op basis. If you are selected for an out-of-town co-op job, your campus coordinator probably will help with housing and transportation arrangements for you. There is another advantage to co-op programs, an important one: About 40 percent of all co-op students ultimately are hired by their employers for full-time jobs after graduation. On some campuses, the figure runs as high as 80 percent.

Source: College 101 Making the Most of Your Freshman year. Ronald T. Farrar

Peterson’s Guides, Princeton, New Jersey, 1999

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