Working While You Learn

MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN THE AD in a newspaper or magazine: “In today’s job market,” the headline says, “employers want more than the same old B.S.”

In this case, though, “the same old B.S.” is a Bachelor of Science degree. It’s an attention-getter, all right — and just one salvo in a public-service media campaign being waged by the Advertising Council (the folks who brought us Smokey Bear) on behalf of cooperative education. Co-op, as it’s often called, blends classroom study with periods of paid, career-related work experience. Nearly 900 of the nation’s colleges and universities offer co-op programs of one sort or another, and they’re hoping the message behind the ad campaign — “You earn a future when you earn a degree” — will help attract larger numbers of today’s college-bound students.

Although cooperative education was invented in 1906 by Herman Schneider, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, the concept may just now, 80 years later, be coming into its own. “For students who learn by doing, co-op education is made to order,” says Kitty Porterfield, the scholarship and financial aid officer at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. “It gives them practical information and experience to go out into the world and make their way.”

It also gives them paychecks. And in an era of sharply escalating student indebtedness, any new twists on an old idea — working your way through college — may count for more than ever before. Students and their families, in fact, will borrow more than $10 billion this year to pay for college expenses, and, with the cost of education rising faster than the cost of living, that figure has nowhere to go but up.

As a result, many educators and policy-makers are worrying these days about what effects the mounting indebtedness may be having on students’ academic and career choices. Larger student-loan debts will lead to more defaults, they say, and will move many college graduates away from the careers of their choice and into fast-track fields offering lots of money and little else. As Joseph Re, executive vice president of Octameron Associates, an Alexandria-based educational publishing and consulting firm, puts it: “Do we want our young people to pursue a life of work, or a life of worth?”

Even students who need financial aid to attend college have been earning less and borrowing more. In the 1970-71 academic year for example, grants made up 66 percent of the typical student’s financial aid package; loans, 28.9 percent; and work, 5.1 percent. By 1984-85, the mix of the typical aid package had become: loans, 51.7 percent; grants, 44.6 percent; and work, 3.7 percent.

Little wonder, then, that a growing number of colleges and universities across the nation have been expanding — and experimenting with — their student employment programs. In perhaps the most significant initiative, the Charles A. Dana Foundation awarded 17 private colleges $200,000 apiece to make student jobs more meaningful. Each school agreed to match the Dana funds with at least $400,000 in new financial aid, all aimed at offering students jobs that reinforce their academic work, advance their research or teaching skills, help them explore career alternatives, or provide experience in cultural, social-service, or political activities.

A few snapshots of other innovative approaches:

♦ The University of Minnesota hires students to fill all non-academic jobs requiring 29 hours of work a week or less. These student workers — 17,000 of them, or about one-third of the university’s work force — are paid salaries comparable to those of nonstudents for the same kind of work. Estimated annual student earnings: $70 million.

♦ At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, alumni have raised money for summer fellowships that allow students to take challenging — but often low-paying — jobs. The “Cornell Tradition” program, as it’s called, also supports a career-related summer job network.

♦ Through Boston University’s “Quickie Job Service,” students earned roughly $250,000 last year doing odd jobs that ranged from leaf raking and house cleaning to carpentry and calligraphy.

 

WHILE COOPERATIVE EDUCATION can’t exactly be considered innovative anynore, it, too, has experienced substantial growth in recent years. The number of institutions offering co-op programs vaulted from 200 in 1970 to more than 1,000 in 1983, and, despite some bottoming-out in the market since then, the demand still seems to exceeds the supply. Today, as many as 180,000 students are enrolled in co-op programs across the nation, and upwards of 80,000 employers are estimated to participate in one way or another.

Why the boomlet? The biggest reason is that cooperative education really seems to work — for students, for educational institutions, and for employers. And while the co-op approach may not be for everyone, its proponents point to these advantages:

Co-op students can “test the waters” in several fields. While some students comfortably zero in on a career choice soon after starting college, many others feel as if they’re trying to make one of life’s more important decisions in a vacuum. Co-op jobs can provide such students with low-risk opportunities to shop around.

Co-op students earn while they learn. One recent study found that co-op students in four-year liberal arts programs earned an average of $875 a month, and that students in co-op engineering programs earned an average of $1,100 a month. While this kind of money is far from big potatoe€s, it can make a sizable dent in college costs. And for some students who might not otherwise be able to afford college, co-op earnings may just make the difference.

Co-op students may have a competitive edge in a crowded job market. Compared to their counterparts, surveys show, graduates of co-op programs are more likely to have a better understanding of the workplace, greater certainty about the career choice, and superior job-hunting skills,

Co-op jobs frequently lead to permanent jobs. On average€, two of every five co-op students wind up working for one of their co-op employers after graduation. Many companies, in fact, use co-op programs to screen, select, and recruit students for permanent employment after graduation.

While many colleges and universities have started co-op programs in recent years as a means of combating declining enrollments, some institutions have, for generations, embraced cooperative education not only as a way of learning, but almost as a way of life. At Northeastern University in Boston, for example, the tradition.goes back more than three-quarters of a century, and today more than 80 percent of all students in the college of arts and sciences  choose to go co-op. (In the university’s seven other colleges, co-op enrollment is virtually mandatory.) Northeastern’s cooperative education program is the largest in the nation, and, along with those at the University of Cincinnati and Antioch College in Ohio, one of the best-known.

“There’s a myth out there that co-op is vocational/trade school, make-work education,” says Richard Sprague, assistant dean of cooperative education at Northeastern. “We see it, and believe in it, as an academic program. One-half is classroom study, and one-half is the practical application of what’s learned in the classroom.”

Co-op students at Northeastern alternate three-month-long quarters of academic study with equal periods of field experience, and graduate in five years instead of the traditional four. They are evaluated, but not graded, for their on-the-job performance. And they keep whatever they earn — $6,500 to
$6,800 a year, on average, for two quarters (six months) of work. Moreover. the university places no ceiling on how much co-op students can earn.

“The students here,” says Paul Jones, Northeastern’s public relations director, “sometimes do better than their teachers.”

Although the typical student’s earnings are nearly enough to offset a year’s tuition ($7,183 in 1986-87), officials at Northeastern and many other co-op schools are quick to point out that money shouldn’t be the big draw. “It’s unfair to overemphasize the value of co-op as a way to pay for college,” Jones says. “It’s not a solution to financing a college education. It’s an opportunity to explore careers and get a leg up on future employment.”

For college-bound students interested in the cooperative approach, but unsure of whether they want to commit themselves to a full-scale, five-year regimen, there are plenty of alternatives. American University, for example, offers what’s called a “parallel” co-op Plan, in which students go to school part-time and work part-time. (Northeastern’s program is typical of “alternating” plans.) By taking summer and evening courses, co-op students at American University can graduate in the traditional four years.

Participation in American University’s co-op program has grown from a dozen or so students in 1975, the year it was started, to more than 500 today. This year, the school’s co-op students will collectively earn more than $1 million, at average wages of $5.50 to $6 an hour. While most of the participating employers are in or near the nation’s capital, students have landed co-op jobs in New York (for NBC News) and in Bogota, Columbia (for
Honeywell Inc.), among other places. As for the difference between a co-op job and an internship? “Employers see it more as an employer-employee relationship, says Patricia van der Vorm, executive director of the university’s career center. “They pay our students the same thing they would pay someone off the street.”

Coop students at American University, unlike those at Northeastern and many other institutions, also receive academic credit for their field experiences, which are supervised by a faculty member. From the student’s point of view, however, this may turn out to be something of a mixed blessing, because American University charges full tuition for any credits they earn on the job. “In most cases, the student doesn’t lose money,” van der Vorm says. “At A.U., we don’t emphasize this as a financial aid program.

Strictly from a dollars-and-cents standpoint, in fact, cooperative education programs may hold the greatest appeal for students who don’t need financial aid to attend college. For many of these students, co-op earnings represent “gravy” in the educational-expenses equation. On the other hand, students who do need financial help to attend college generally wind up working anyway, because their aid packages typically are a mix of loans, grants, and projected earnings from a work-study program. In theory, at least, these students are playing a zero-sum game: the more money they earn through employment, they less they are likely to get in financial aid.

More than 870,000 students with financial need are provided part-time, minimum-wage-or-above jobs through College Work Study, a federal program that pays up to 80 percent of their salaries. How much students earn depends on their financial need, the amount of funds available to the educational institution, and the hourly wage set by the employer. (Nearly 90 percent of the students are employed by their college or university; the rest work off-campus for nonprofit agencies or organizations.) College and university officials have been saying for some time now that they could find work for as many as a million more students — if Congress would only appropriate more money for the program. And at least 17 states have their own work-study programs, with another 15, at last count, considering them.

 

VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE WORK-STUDY PROGRAMS, however, seem to share two drawbacks: limited hours and low wages. “Students often discover that working the estimated 12 hours a week during school terms at the minimum wage or slightly above does not earn them a great deal to pay for spiraling college costs,” a recent report of the College Board noted. Indeed, one survey shows that most undergraduate financial aid recipients meet only 6 percent of their college expenses from work-study programs — whether federal, state, or school-sponsored. And while federal law requires that work study employment must, “to the maximum extent practicable, complement and reinforce the educational program or vocational goals of students,
many of them wind up cleaning floors, washing dishes, or answering telephones.

On what seems to be an increasing number of campuses across the nation, students themselves have been coming up with better ways to pay for college — or at least to soften the blow of rising tuition bills. They’ve been going into business for themselves. Making money is the idea, of course, but they also pick up marketable sales and management skills along the way. Some colleges and universities are willing to provide these student entrepreneurs with what amounts to venture capital: start-up funds, office space, and equipment, an investment the students repay as their businesses pass the break-even point. At Princeton, for example, students sell everything from personal computers to linen service and late-night pizza. At Columbia, a student-run service called College Care delivers fruit baskets, birthday cakes, bouquets of balloons, and other gifts, and another student enterprise, the Tutoring and Translating Agency, counts ABC News and the South Korean consulate among its clients. And at Harvard, the pioneer in promoting student-operated businesses, 11 agencies employing 1,200 students are expected to gross about $2 million this year.

And here’s a final bit of good news for students wondering about whether they ought to work while they’re in college, whether it’s washing dishes or peddling PCs. Recent research shows that students who work up to 20 hours a week during their college years have greater persistence, retention, and self-satisfaction than students who don’t.

The lesson? Money still may be the best reason for working while in college, but good grades and happiness don’t seem to be far behind.

 

This article originally appeared in the August 10, 1986, edition of The Washington Post Education Review.