Factors Associated with Student Participation in Cooperative Education Programs (Co-Ops)

A cooperative education program (co-op) in engineering is a partnership between an academic institution and an employer designed to engage students in practical engineering experience through rotations of full-time employment and course study. Co-op employment provides students with multiple benefits, including discipline-relevant professional experience, financial support, and early entry into the engineering labor force while serving as a recruitment tool for co-op companies. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study identifies factors that are associated with student participation in co-ops. The data comprising over 52,000 students from six institutions across 23 years were analyzed using logit regression. While women are as likely to participate in co-ops as men, Asian and Black engineering students are 22% less likely to participate than their peers. The qualitative inquiry entailed 10 student interviews focusing on the reasons why the students decided not to complete the co-op application process, despite their initial interest. The primary reasons were interest in other extracurricular activities and the seemingly lengthy time commitment associated with co-ops (3-5 semesters). Research findings have the potential to be applied toward the development of strategies to further enhance co-op recruitment and engagement of engineering students from a broader range of backgrounds, interests, and experiences as a pathway to potentially increase the overall diversity of the professional engineering labor force. Introduction and Background Cooperative education programs (co-ops) in engineering are designed to provide students with professional experience relevant to their academic discipline in alternating cycles between paid full-time employment and traditional full-time classroom education. Co-ops are work opportunities for undergraduate students organized in partnership with industry based organizations, which can also be referred to as Work-Integrated Learning (WIL). There are several associated benefits to students who participate in co-ops, including higher academic grades and higher graduation probabilities, as well as discipline-relevant professional experience, financial support, and early entry into the engineering labor force. Therefore, co-op participation may be an effective method for improving the academic and employment outcomes of engineering students. While the literature on the potential benefits of co-op participation is robust, few researchers have examined what factors influence co-op participation and why some students decide not to participate. Understanding the factors that influence student co-op participation is therefore important because relative increases in college persistence and greater engagement in the engineering labor market can help toward meeting the nation’s growing demand for a larger engineering labor force and to maintain the nation’s competitiveness in technological and scientific areas. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study to (1) identify student characteristics that are associated with participation in co-ops disaggregated by engineering discipline, and (2) examine why some students choose not to participate in co-ops and whether they perceive barriers to participation. P ge 26757.2 Our findings have the potential to help students, co-op administrators, and employers further assess the conditions that encourage student participation in co-ops. Since we also focus on differences in participation by gender and race/ethnicity, our findings can also be applied to developing strategies to further enhance co-op recruitment and engagement of engineering students from a broader range of backgrounds, interests, and experiences as a pathway to potentially increase the overall diversity of the professional engineering labor force. Data and Methods: A Mixed-Methods Approach To identify factors associated with students’ probability of participating in co-ops, we analyzed comprehensive, longitudinal academic student records from six institutions that comprise the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD includes 23 years of student demographic and transcript data from 1987 through 2009. Our sample is limited to institutions offering voluntary co-ops, and to engineering majors that are offered across multiple institutions: Aerospace, Chemical, Civil, Computer, Electrical, Industrial and Systems, and Mechanical engineering. To account for the variation in eligibility and program requirements across academic institutions, only students who meet the minimum co-op eligibility requirements at their respective institution, who were enrolled in an engineering major at the end of second semester, and who were not transfer students were included in the sample. The resulting dataset includes 52,070 students, of whom 15,771 participated in co-ops. Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of the sample. We applied logistic regression models to estimate the probability of whether or not engineering students will participate in their institution’s co-op program. The full statistical model (equation 1) includes institution, start year, race/ethnicity, cumulative grade point average (GPA) at the end of the second semester, peer economic status, high school GPA, gender, and declared major.