The Making of the History
Ninety Years of Northeastern Co-op
By john-pierre smollins
Cooperative education and Northeastern University. The two may seem
synonymous, but the concept of alternating classroom instruction with stints
of real-world work wasn't born on Huntington Avenue.
In fact, when Northeastern's earliest incarnation, the Evening Institute
for Young Men at the Boston YMCA, opened its doors to its first students
in 1896, the godfather of co-op hadn't even formulated his plan for the
new teaching strategy.
Co-op originated hundreds of miles from Boston, as
a glimmer in the eye of a young professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania. Herman Schneider had enrolled at Lehigh as a student in 1890,
studying architecture and engineering. During his four years at the school,
Schneider, like many other middle-class men, worked part-time and between
sessions to help pay for his education.
After graduation, Schneider entered the business world, opening his
own architectural firm and later going to work constructing bridges for
a railroad company. When he returned to his alma mater five years later,
in 1899, to become an instructor of civil engineering, he soon concluded
that traditional classroom instruction could take engineering and other
technical students only so far. It's said that one evening, while walking
across the Lehigh campus, Schneider was pondering how to answer this dilemma
when he was startled by the blast of a Bessemer converter at a nearby steel
plant. There was his lab, he realized, ready and waiting.
Schneider quickly devised the framework of cooperative education, believing
it to be the ideal educational model: students could learn their craft
in a work setting, while also earning a wage to help cover the rising costs
of higher education. At the same time, they could make professional contacts
that could lead to employment opportunities after graduation.
Administrators at Lehigh, however, viewed co-op differently. They doubted
its benefits and its feasibility. Schneider eventually left Lehigh and
spent a few years trying to interest other universities in co-op. In 1903,
the University of Cincinnati decided to give Schneider and his pet program
a chance.
Schneider joined the Cincinnati faculty as an assistant professor of
civil engineering, rapidly rising to dean of the College of Engineering
on the strength of his co-op concept. On April 16, 1905, the university's
board of trustees approved an experimental year of cooperative education-adding
this caveat: " . . . the failure of which we will not assume responsibility."
In the fall of the next year, twenty-seven students, working toward degrees
in chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering, signed on for a six-year
program that alternated weeks of study and work. Fifteen companies took
on this inaugural group.
At the end of the experimental year, Cincinnati gave Schneider the go-ahead
to continue the co-op program. The following year, 800 students applied.
Sixty were accepted. Study was married to work.
Sensing the possibilities for co-op, Schneider began to present his
educational model to anyone interested. He spoke at conferences, barnstormed
around the country, and published articles in educational journals.
Many colleges considered co-op a gimmick. But others
saw it as an opportunity-a chance to attract new students who needed an
alternative to traditional educational models. One such school was just
creating its own identity in Boston, on Huntington Avenue.
The YMCA's Evening Institute had grown by leaps and bounds by 1909.
After a humble start as a night school for working men, the institute had
expanded in just fifteen years to encompass schools of law, civil service,
music, commerce and finance, advertising, and automobile driving and repair.
It was into this environment that cooperative education dawned at Northeastern.
The university's unofficial historian, Antoinette Frederick, gives the
credit to the then dean of the Evening Polytechnic School. "Professor
Hercules W. Geromanos," writes Frederick in
Northeastern University: An Emerging Giant, 19591975, "reading
about the University of Cincinnati's program, became convinced that 'Co-op'
was equally applicable to Northeastern students, and in 1909 the College
of Engineering became the second in the country to try cooperative education."
In the program's first year of existence, eight students were placed
with four companies and alternated classroom study with real-world work
on a weekly basis for the entire calendar year. They worked a minimum of
1,700 hours per year, for a total of 6,800 hours over the six-year program.
The students received ten cents per hour in their first year of employment.
In each successive year, their wage rose by two cents per hour. The pay
offset the annual school's tuition of $100.
The following year, co-op enrollment rose to thirty students, and the
administration began promoting the program as the ideal educational alternative
for the engineering student looking to attract the attention of employers.
The institute's 190910 catalog outlined the co-op offerings, in a
chapter subtitled "Earning while learning": "Not only have
the school authorities been much gratified with the interest of the students
and the progress they have made, but the employers of these young men have
been most emphatic in their endorsement of the plan in its bearing upon
skilled technical ability."
Four years later, 107 eager engineers-to-be enrolled
in co-op. And by the time the Evening Institute became Northeastern College
in 1916, co-op was firmly entrenched. Dean Geromanos, with the blessing
of the college's first president, Frank Palmer Speare, remained the program's
overseer until his retirement in 1917. But his successor as dean of engineering,
Carl Ell, was the man who made co-op work. The first in a long line of
co-op innovators, Ell, later Northeastern's president, doubled the size
of the program the year he took over.
Ten years after co-op's introduction, the number of engineering students
taking part had grown from 8 to 407. In 1919, the Cooperative School of
Engineering became the largest school at Northeastern.
By this time, other colleges and universities around the country had
gotten into the act. Antioch College received so much publicity for its
early advances in co-op, adapting it to its liberal arts curricula, that
many called co-op the "Antioch Plan."
But few were as dedicated to the concept as Northeastern. In 1922, the
school expanded co-op beyond the bounds of engineering when the College
of Business Administration adopted the program. Perceiving that co-op could
be valuable to all students, the university tied itself securely to this
still young form of education, making the concept mandatory in all new
undergraduate programs.
But this allegiance was tested by two of the watershed events of American
history. The first was the Great Depression. Where more than 1,100 Northeastern
students took part in co-op during the 192930 school year, participation
stood at 786 three years later, in the midst of the financial crisis. The
placement rate of students at employers fell to forty-two percent. Companies
were firing workers, not hiring young apprentices.
But as bad as the numbers were, co-op's placement rate
was much better than that of the open market. Joseph Barbeau, author of
Second to None: Seventy-Five Years of Leadership in the Cooperative Education
Movement, a 1985 chronicle of co-op at Northeastern, credits this success
to both the quality of the students and the efforts of the co-op counselors,
who had established ties with the corporate world that proved strong enough
to last the toughest times.
And even amidst the turmoil, Northeastern pushed forward with co-op,
opening the College of Liberal Arts as a co-op school in 1935. By the time
the economic shocks subsided, all students at N.U. were studying on the
co-op track. Enrollment in the program reached a high of 1,676 in 194142.
But World War II forced the university to shelve co-op. To take part
in the war effort, Northeastern introduced an accelerated learning program,
allowing students to complete their degrees in half the usual time by using
the co-op periods for classroom study. Other co-op programs around the
nation became casualties of the war. Twelve schools canceled their programs
altogether when students headed to battle.
At Northeastern, however, co-op was too central to the university's
mission to be discontinued permanently. A 1946 text declared that "the
Northeastern University cooperative plan of education was developed to
fill two obvious needs: to assist capable but needy students to earn their
college expenses and to bridge the gap between business theory and practice."
After the war, students flocked back to the university
and the co-op program. The postwar boom helped co-op break new ground:
in 195052, 3,016 students participated. Some of these students were
part of a new wave that had begun rising during the war years. In 1943,
Northeastern opened its doors to its first female students. Six women entered
the college, four of whom took advantage of co-op, thus instituting coeducation
at an institution that had begun as part of the YMCA.
When Asa Knowles became president of the university in 1959, over 3,300
students were completing co-op assignments, some at the graduate level.
But more than seventy percent of those students were enrolled in the engineering
or business colleges-a concentration Knowles aimed to change. Soon after
his inauguration, the new president changed the name of the Office of Cooperative
Work to the Department of Cooperative Education and appointed Roy Wooldridge
as dean and director. The renaming of the department signaled that "earning
while learning" was no longer the program's main objective. Knowles
instead aimed to focus on the inverse: learning while earning.
In 1965, the Higher Education Act became federal law, following lobbying
on Capitol Hill by Wooldridge. A section of the law provided funding specifically
for schools that offered co-op. With the new grants, Northeastern created
the Division of Cooperative Education, an entity that consisted of five
departments: the Department of Cooperative Education, the Center for Cooperative
Education, the Cooperative Education Research Center, the Center for Secondary
School Work Experience Education, and the Department of Graduate Placement
Services.
In addition to handling co-op on N.U.'s campus, the Division of Cooperative
Education served as the focal point for a big expansion of co-op across
the country. Administrators interested in bringing co-op to their schools
or in expanding existing programs journeyed to Boston.
"Northeastern went out and proselytized for co-op and Northeastern
was instrumental in bringing co-op to many institutions around the country,"
says Robert Vozzella, recently retired as the vice president of the co-op
division. "We brought it to them, and we also had a training center
at the university, so consequently there was an influx of people who wanted
to know about cooperative education."
Within a couple of years of the signing of the Higher Education Act,
Northeastern had grown into the largest private university in the nation.
Co-op also grew at a high rate nationally, as the number of schools offering
the program easily topped 100. The concept of cooperative education gained
status in educational circles during this period-a time when traditional
forms of higher education were under attack.
A 1972 profile in a Barron's guide to American colleges
highlighted N.U.'s position in the realm of education: "In a time
when relevance in higher education is being heralded, Northeastern has
been offering cooperative education to its students for six decades. Highly
experienced in this form of education, the university has striven to provide
for its students thorough, meaningful employment, as a practical application
of the theories and basic principles learned in the classrooms."
Knowles's vision for the program extended overseas. He made several
international co-op overtures, traveling to England to participate in the
Anglo-American Conference on Higher Education, to Israel to present a paper
at the Third World Congress of Engineers, and to Hawaii to speak at the
Pacific Conference on Cooperative Education.
The emphasis on the educational benefits of co-op and co-op's role nationally
and internationally continued under Kenneth Ryder, who became president
of the university in 1975. One year after Ryder's inauguration, the co-op
department moved into its own home, the Russell Stearns Center. By that
time, 7,857 students were on assignment at co-op employers.
By 1982, Northeastern had become the acknowledged world leader in co-op
education, with 9,353 students enrolled in the program. But when John Curry
replaced Ryder as president in 1989, the co-op department was struggling
to deal with a recession that struck the Northeast particularly hard.
Reminiscent of the Depression, co-op coordinators and their students
had to scramble to find placements. But the recession, coupled with a decline
in enrollment, took a toll. The total number of N.U. undergraduates fell
from 27,500 in 198889, working at 14,300 co-op jobs, to 22,300 in
1992, working at 10,500 co-op jobs.
Despite the diminishing co-op employment numbers, the
recession highlighted the strength of N.U.'s co-op program during its darkest
days. "My feeling when I was dean was that if a student really wanted
to work, if that was his or her prime motivation, then we could find them
a job," recalls Paul Pratt, the acting dean of the co-op department
at that time. "It might not have been the best job, it might not have
been convenient, it might mean a commuting problem away from home, but
the jobs were there. There was no time, even in the worst of times when
a lot of full-time professional people were out of work, that our unemployment
rate went more than ten to fifteen percent."
The domestic difficulties compelled Northeastern to look for different
avenues to establish co-op placements. Vozzella, then dean of international
co-op, established new contacts overseas, providing students the opportunity
to find co-op positions in other countries.
It was also during this period that an internal debate over the status
of co-op coordinators was resolved. A Faculty Senate decision in 1991 changed
coordinators from tenure-track educators to nontenured professional staff
focused on creating co-op positions and placing students (while retaining
the tenure track for existing coordinators).
"That was a very important issue to the Board of Trustees and it
ties to my philosophy," Curry says today, "because my sense is
that [coordinators] should not be expected to do most of the things that
a mechanical engineering teacher does-that their job is as a placement
counselor to help students get a better co-op job and develop co-op jobs
from industry, so that those jobs are always improving for the liberal
arts or the engineering student."
Today, Northeastern remains the largest cooperative education program
in the nation, with approximately 6,500 students on assignment each year.
And through economic strife and financial booms, on a national or global
scale, the original concept of cooperative education remains very familiar
ninety years after its birth.
"How we do it may have changed," says current
co-op dean Robert Tillman. "The sophistication and the understanding
may have changed, we may have better studies, we may have collected better
data . . . We're probably a lot more student-oriented than we were.
"But I think the basic premise is the same: learning by doing.
The two domains can coexist very well together. They can reinforce each
other, and they can enhance one another."
Surely, in the great lecture hall in the sky, Herman Schneider is smiling.
John-Pierre Smollins, MA'97, is a news producer at ABC-6 television
in Providence, Rhode Island.
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