Co-op Planet
Organizations at N.U. Plant Co-op's
Seeds Far and Wide
By Ann Carlson
The term "cooperative education" originated in the United
States, but did the concept? Perhaps not: in 1903, three years before Herman
Schneider founded his program in Cincinnati, Sunderland Technical College
in northern England launched a "sandwich education" program for
architecture and engineering students. The term endures to this day, used
to describe work-integrated professional education in the United Kingdom.
Co-op as we know it arrived at Northeastern in 1909. Not until around
1950 did cooperative education hop back across the Atlantic, debuting in
the Netherlands that year. Canada saw its first co-op program in 1956,
and Australia in 1962. The early '60s marked the beginning of a major expansion
movement throughout the United States and around the globe. As co-op programs
popped up here, there, and everywhere in subsequent decades, Northeastern
was leading the charge.
Two independent co-op associations-one with a national focus, the other
international-came into being and ultimately made their home on N.U.'s
main campus. While Northeastern did not absorb these organizations, it
played a vital role in funding their operations, nourishing their growth,
and burnishing their prestige. Both groups promoted the co-op concept to
educators, business leaders, and government officials across the United
States and abroad.
The National Commission for Cooperative Education came first. Seventeen
years later, in 1979, the World Association for Cooperative Education began
to take shape. Following several years in which it was based in the Netherlands
and Canada, it established a permanent secretariat at Northeastern in 1995.
At the end of nearly a century of co-op, President Richard Freeland
leads a university that exercises a position of international leadership
in cooperative education. Part of this influence stems from the continuing
presence of the National Council and the World Association at Northeastern-and
N.U.'s role in them.
For Freeland, both organizations are important to the future of practice
oriented education. "The strength of the Commission is that it is
building public understanding and appreciation of co-op. The World Association
is valuable because it keeps us connected to the best thinking regarding
work-based learning around the world," says Freeland, who serves as
a National Commission vice chair and trustee and as the World Association's
vice president for development. "Both of these organizations have
asserted ambitious agendas for shaping co-op in the future."
The two groups share a spacious third-floor suite in Columbus Place,
N.U.'s newest administrative building, on the south side of the campus.
This most architecturally diverse section of the university faces both
literally and figuratively toward wider horizons.
From this vantage points, the National Commission and World Association-two
entities unfamiliar to most N.U. students or graduates-are influencing
the evolution of cooperative education. Today that concept has spread through
the spectrum of the world's economic and political systems. And Northeastern
expertise remains at the very center of this activity.
External co-op promotion took on the characteristics of a religious
crusade in the early 1960s, a fact that will not surprise those who knew
N.U.'s third president, Asa Knowles. A blunt autocrat who was nonetheless
a visionary, Knowles was eager to seize any opportunity to take Northeastern's
name and philosophy beyond the limits of Huntington Avenue.
A two-year Ford Foundation study had just concluded that cooperative
education should be expanded to more of America's colleges and universities.
At the time, about 150 utilized some form of work-related education. Knowles
saw the perfect opportunity for Northeastern to jump ahead of the University
of Cincinnati, its fifty-year rival for co-op supremacy. The Ford and Edison
Foundations were supporting a new national group designed to spread the
co-op gospel-the National Commission for Cooperative Education. It set
up shop in the Edison Foundation's New York office.
Knowles, a trustee of the group, sought a leader who would possess the
same missionary zeal for the task of spreading co-op that he himself brought
to it. And he knew just the person for the job: Roy Wooldridge, a 1945
graduate of the College of Engineering and N.U.'s dean of cooperative work.
Wooldridge brought expertise, energy, and enthusiasm to whatever he tackled.
Speaking today from his winter home in Florida, Wooldridge recalls how
Knowles offered him the post. "Knowles handed me a slip of paper with
the Commission's address and phone number. 'Call them up and make the arrangements,'
he told me. So I did," he says. Wooldridge would spend Wednesdays
and Thursdays in New York; the balance of the week, he was back in the
dean's office on campus. "Sid Austin and Tom McMahon ran the co-op
department for me when I was out of town," he says.
In Wooldridge's first National Commission assignment, he compiled and
published a report on how three co-op institutions-Northeastern, Cincinnati,
and Drexel-had survived the Depression. It was the first of many studies
that he would produce. He also traveled around the country meeting with
any educator, business leader, and politician who would listen to him,
extolling the benefits of starting or expanding co-op programs.
Northeastern organized a major conference on co-op, drawing important
executives and government officials. Knowles and Wooldridge served as expert
witnesses at congressional hearings on co-op program funding. Capitol Hill
was particularly receptive.
"Whenever we met with politicians of that era, you could always
predict their reaction. 'You're talking about students working to pay their
tuition? By God, that's like apple pie and motherhood!' No matter what
party they belonged to, they'd see it the same way," Wooldridge says.
Under the Higher Education Act, money began to flow. By the time the
federal faucet was turned off in the early 1990s, more than $220 million
had been appropriated and spent on setting up and expanding co-op programs
throughout the country.
In 1972, Wooldridge became the National Commission's executive director
and moved its office onto N.U.'s campus. But not everyone at the university
liked the idea of sharing Northeastern's co-op secrets with rival schools.
Wooldridge remembers how his boss responded to the persistent concerns
of one dean, who warned that the school would put itself out of business
by overrunning the field with clones.
"Knowles was from Maine, so he used the image of ships at low tide
in the harbor. He said that Northeastern and other schools were like these
boats. When the tide of cooperative education success came flooding in,
all of them would ride high on it."
By the time Wooldridge retired in 1990 as vice president for cooperative
education, the initial group of 150 co-op institutions had grown to 1,000.
Ralph Porter, the National Commission's second executive director, reports
that, from the mid-1970s to the mid-'80s, he made 500 trips around the
U.S. to counsel administrators of existing and would-be co-op programs.
"It frightens me now when I think about it," he says today.
The National Commission's standing as a leader of the co-op movement
gained more ground with a five-year public awareness campaign, conducted
between 1985 and 1990 in collaboration with the Advertising Council. It
netted the idea of cooperative education some $150 million of free national
media time and exposure to an estimated audience of 131 million. More than
100,000 inquiries, many from high school students and their parents, poured
into the Commission's offices, which channeled them to individual co-op
institutions.
In 1979, a group of educators from Australia,
Britain, Canada, and the United States met at Brunel University outside
London. They all represented schools that championed work-related education
and they came to learn from one another. The informal meeting was so productive
that the group, headed by Northeastern president Kenneth Ryder, resolved
to reconvene two years later, and, after the fact, dubbed the get-together
the first World Conference on Cooperative Education.
Activities to extend Northeastern's reach in the international co-op
arena appealed greatly to Ryder and became a hallmark of his administration.
In 1981, he hosted the second World Conference in Boston. Executives from
Gillette and Raytheon, longtime employers of N.U. co-ops, addressed the
group, which had mushroomed to more than 1,000 attendees from some thirty-four
countries, all drawn together by co-op.
"Before the conference ended, a group of the founders adjourned
to a private dining room at Locke-Ober," says Wooldridge, who was
present. "The Australians offered to host the next conference in 1983
and committed $10,000 toward it. It was there that the concept of a World
Association for Cooperative Education was born."
Ryder subsequently became the group's first president.
One of his top priorities was providing funds to enable educators from
developing nations to attend Association events. He also initiated the
organization's first publication, the newsletter Global Newslink, to further
idea- and information-sharing among members.
Although the World Association was now a distinct entity, it lacked
structure and direction. When John Curry succeeded Ryder as Northeastern
president, he spearheaded the move to make the Association a full-fledged
professional organization that would operate as more than an information
clearinghouse and a biennial conference organizer.
In his term as World Association president, which began in 1994, Curry
led the creation of a strong governance structure, the incorporation of
the Association as a formal nonprofit organization, and the development
of a strategic plan that set forth specific, renewable goals for increasing
the number of co-op programs worldwide. And Curry turned the plan into
something more than a document gathering dust on an office shelf: during
his tenure, new co-op programs began in Indonesia, Malaysia, and New Zealand.
He also succeeded in getting the organization to add more women and minorities
to its leadership and piloted the drive to move the headquarters from Mohawk
College of Applied Arts and Technology in Ontario to a permanent headquarters
at Northeastern with a permanent, paid staff.
Transforming what had been a volunteer organization into a professional
association fell to former Wooldridge staffer Peter Franks, LA'71, MEd'74,
who began work as its executive director once the World Association was
in Boston. In February 1996, Curry and Franks initiated the first of what
would become an ongoing series of global teleconferences, drawing participants
from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, and Malaysia to discuss fund-raising
strategies for the organization.
Curry was not content to sit in his office making conference calls.
He traveled the world to meet with heads of state interested in establishing
co-op in their national educational systems, including President Mary Robinson
of Ireland, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Suharto of Indonesia,
and Prime Minister P. J. Patterson of Jamaica. Both Robinson and Patterson
later received Northeastern honorary degrees.
Since 1997, Freeland has brought an increasing level of strength to
the World Association, says Franks, now the group's CEO. During the past
two years, the organization has focused on providing greater value to its
members-now close to 800 professionals in thirty-nine countries-who have
more than doubled in number since the World Association moved to Northeastern.
Out of the 1997 World Conference in Cape Town, South Africa, came the
idea for a Global Training Unit-a team of experienced practitioners, based
at Northeastern, who will conduct custom-designed courses on different
aspects of operating co-op programs. Training will take place either at
Northeastern or on-site.
"The World Association is becoming considerably more ambitious
than ever before in its history," Freeland says. "Besides launching
the training unit, we are conducting systematic research about co-op across
national lines, to determine how it impacts in different economic/social
systems and benefits both education and business." Paul Harrington
of N.U.'s Center for Labor Market Studies is heading this project.
The World Association has also become a vehicle for international academic
collaboration. At the Cape Town conference, Freeland signed an agreement
with Vice Chancellor Olof Blomqvist of the University of Trollhättan/
Uddevalla, Sweden's first co-op institution, to establish a course and
co-op exchange program in computer science and business administration.
Freeland believes that this and other agreements like it will make more
foreign jobs available to N.U. students and will increase the appeal of
Northeastern to international students. "Since Northeastern has one
of the largest international student bodies of any university in the USA,
I would like more of our students to have an overseas work experience,"
he says.
Although the tally of business leaders on the World Association's membership
list has risen from a handful to fifteen percent in the last few years,
Freeland and Franks see boosting corporate involvement as a key to the
future success of the organization. And they think they have a strong sales
pitch.
"All multinational businesses have critical human resource needs,"
says Franks. "They must keep a supply of highly trained, productive
employees in the pipeline while holding down their recruitment costs. Hiring
co-op students is an excellent, cost-effective solution. If they perform
well, they can be offered permanent positions with the company after graduation."
Just three years from now, the National Commission for Cooperative Education
will celebrate its fortieth anniversary. For any organization to remain
vital that long, it must have the flexibility to adapt to changing times.
One of the greatest challenges the Commission has faced is adjusting to
the end of federal funding for the expansion of cooperative education programs,
many of which it had helped to establish.
When, in 1992, Congress declared victory in the effort to expand cooperative
education and eliminated all funding, the National Commission had to shift
gears from its decades-old role of Washington lobbyist and training center.
It did so by focusing on outreach activities: research and education, public
awareness (connecting high school students and their parents to co-op colleges),
national advocacy (including a project with the National School-to-Work
Opportunities Office and the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor),
and the college and corporate partnership programs. Current Commission
president Paul Stonely has worked to keep abreast of developments in Washington
that affect co-op.
Now a new role is emerging for the Commission-as an agency that sets
and monitors standards for cooperative education programs. As Freeland
frames it, "Shouldn't the Commission be the place where excellence
in cooperative education gets defined? The commission can be a powerful
vehicle for getting out the message. Instead of developing more and more
co-op programs, I am very much on the side of defining quality and linking
membership to that. Maybe the commission should be smaller than it is-30
to 40 members, for example, instead of 200 to 300."
Increasing excellence in co-op is very much on Freeland's mind these
days. The "Call to Action on Cooperative Education at Northeastern
University" stands as a blueprint for major change at the nation's
leading co-op institution. He feels that if the leader is getting its house
in order for a new century, Northeastern has the right and responsibility
to ask other co-op schools to hold themselves to the same high standard
of excellence.
At the same time, Northeastern has begun to decrease the financial support
it gives to both the National Commission and the World Association. For
more than two decades, the university has provided the lion's share of
dollars for both operations.
With both organizations in a mature stage of their development, Freeland
insists that the time has come to make other sustaining members equal financial
partners with Northeastern. With the approval of both groups' governing
boards, he has acted to bring about that equality.
"We have adopted a five-year schedule," he explains. "I
will maintain Northeastern's level of support for both organizations at
declining levels. By steadily withdrawing more Northeastern dollars, it
will bring about parity among National Commission and World Association
members, and help both organizations stand more on their own."
Although this step represents a major change from past practice, Freeland
sees the move as a step forward that will actually serve to increase the
strength of the groups and improve N.U.'s role within them.
"I think both Northeastern and cooperative education will be better
off when these going concerns-the National Commission and the World Association-enjoy
a heightened level of support from a broader number of sponsors. It is
absolutely right that more individuals will play key roles in them,"
he says.
In that event, these two organizations will continue to play key roles
in shaping and enhancing cooperative education at home and abroad.
Ann Carlson, LA'65, MA'72, is a freelance writer in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
Going Far with International Co-op
By Jennifer Babson
Organizations at N.U. Plant Co-op's Seeds Far
and WideYou could say that the Department of International Cooperative
Education is one of Northeastern's best-kept secrets. From its informal
beginnings in the '70s when associate director Ross Hall placed individual
students in co-op jobs abroad, the department has grown to an eight-person
staff working out of the top floor of Stearns Center. They assist American
students in obtaining co-op jobs overseas and prepare the university's
2,462 international students for positions in the U.S. and abroad.
"What's unique about the whole international
program is you get a much different testing of the waters," says Bill
Wheeler, PA'66, a partner in the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers,
which sends co-op students to its offices in Europe and Australia as well
as in the United States. "As [co-ops], they are not given the silver-spoon
treatment; they are really expected to be quite resourceful. This is a
kind of a test which is very, very useful."
For Northeastern students with U.S. citizenship,
the university offers international co-op exchange programs in several
English-speaking countries-the United Kingdom, Ireland, and two recent
additions, Australia and New Zealand-and in France, Germany, the Netherlands,
and Spain. Students participating in these programs live abroad for six
months, working for a diverse group of employers that ranges from Sony
Entertainment and Lehman Brothers to the Northern Ireland Parole Board
and Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Paris. Reciprocal programs with
foreign universities allow their students to come to the U.S. and fill
co-op jobs.
Jill Wilkinson and Tanya Duffy, third-year students
at the University of Ulster in Ireland, and Mariah Managhan, a second-year
student at Greenwich University in London, are spending the current academic
year at Northeastern, working in the university's Administrative Computer
Services office. They're learning mainframe security techniques and Y2K
problem solutions. "It's great experience. Before I came over here,
I could hardly turn on a computer," laughs Duffy.
For foreign students at Northeastern who are eligible
to work in east Asia, two innovative university programs-the Asia Pacific
Home Country Placement Program and the Indonesia Home Country Placement
Program-help them locate work with multinational companies in their native
lands. Established in 1989, the program tutors students (mostly from Northeastern,
but also from other colleges and universities) in job-hunting techniques,
places them in co-op jobs, and helps find them full-time positions after
graduation.
The idea: stem the intellectual and occupational
brain drain that is a problem in many of these countries, by making it
attractive-and financially viable-for young people who are educated overseas
to return home. Companies such as Cargill, Citibank, Johnson & Johnson,
and Motorola participate, and a group of fifteen multinational corporations
has paid the entire costs of the program since 1994. Between 1995 and 1998,
the program placed students in 300 jobs in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore,
and Thailand. The recent Asian financial crisis has slowed placements,
especially in Malaysia, but has not stopped them. A new link with China
shows great promise, says international co-op counselor Mary Sullivan.
The Indonesia Home Country Placement Program has
been particularly successful, helping nearly 200 Indonesians studying at
Northeastern and 1,050 students from 125 other American universities find
jobs in the last decade. The program got underway in 1991 with startup
grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and subsequent
funding from the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Partnership for Education.
Today, the program is sponsored by multinational corporations and the Indonesian
government.
For students, an international co-op might just
be the chance of a lifetime-to travel, to stretch themselves in ways they
never imagined possible, and to prove themselves to a potential employer.
Leigh Le, BA'97, didn't hesitate at the opportunity
to spend six months in Paris working for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Her task:
advising American executives living abroad about their U.S. taxes.
Except for a year she spent in a refugee camp
as an infant in Hong Kong, the resident of Worcester, Massachusetts, had
never been abroad. "I have always wanted to do it and I am very ambitious
and I figured if I didn't do it now, I'd never have the opportunity to
do it," she says.
Le first traveled to London to take a two-week
course on the fundamentals of tax preparation. Then in January 1996, it
was off to the City of Lights-and an apartment on the Rue Rivoli, only
blocks from the Louvre.
"It made me more independent, I think, and
made me see how much I appreciated different people and cultures,"
says Le, now twenty-three. "I have learned that if you have the drive
and the ambition you can basically do anything you want."
Lee parlayed the Paris position into another international
co-op with Pricewaterhouse Coopers-this one in Sydney, Australia-and eventually
into a full-time posting in Stamford, Connecticut, upon graduation. Thanks
to the contacts she made, and the networking skills she honed while on
co-op, Le stepped right out of college into a $44,000-a-year job.
For PricewaterhouseCoopers, Le was a good investment,
Wheeler says. "We were anxious to have people who were interested
in learning about our profession, and particularly people who were interested
in an international experience," he says. "It would be beneficial
for not only them, but for us."
In an era of increasingly global commerce and
communication-one in which the Internet allows you to live in one corner
of the planet and work for an employer or a client in another-an international
exchange program like Northeastern's is no longer considered the educational
equivalent of a long vacation.
"It's designed to stimulate people to get
good professional opportunities," says co-op professor Leonard Zion,
director of the Indonesia Home Country Placement Program. So crucial is
the program to Indonesia's future economic success that the government
has not only publicly endorsed it but has also provided more than $500,000
in funding for administrative costs.
The program provides educated young Indonesians
with a way to overcome stereotypes about the merits of education, Zion
says. "In their culture, young people are not valued if they are able
to go to school because they don't have any real-world experience, so what
co-op gave them was a running start," he says.
The Home Country programs have a role to play
in the efforts of southeast Asian countries to stabilize their economies,
Northeastern staffers believe.
"Our students are really the new blood that
Asia needs," says Priscilla Kelso, assistant project director of the
Home Country Placement program. "They are very highly credentialed,
they are cross-cultured, they can swing back and forth from having an American
education and going back to Asia."
Jacqueline Koh, E'93, rose in six years from a
co-op with NYNEX in Singapore to become general manager of Bell Atlantic
Network Systems there. Koh now travels around Asia implementing Y2K strategies
for the company. She makes a point of trying to promote Northeasterners
who have come after her.
"She is a wonderful success story,"
Kelso says. "Not only is she a Northeastern graduate, she is a power
broker."
As part of N.U.'s services for foreign students,
the international co-op office offers culturally sensitive advising, teaching,
and workshops designed to help foreign students make a smooth transition
to jobs in the United States. A special course for foreign students, "Working
in the U.S.," addresses topics such as résumé-writing
and American-style interviewing for jobs.
The international co-op office also advises American
students going abroad. For example, Elizabeth Cameron, international exchange
program counselor for the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand,
tells American students that a positive international co-op experience
can pivot more on culture than on language. Some students opt for a co-op
in an English-speaking country in the belief that the initial hassles will
be fewer-but that's not always the case, Cameron says.
"Because I deal with English-speaking countries,
I get students who think it's going to be a breeze," she says. "In
many cases, it's the most difficult placement because their own language
lets them down, because it's used differently. How you use language is
really culturally set up."
Understanding that habits and culture drive communication
is one of the lessons students return home with, she says.
In the end, say international co-op staffers and
their students, international co-op jobs involve more opportunities than
pitfalls-for students and employers alike.
"I think everybody needs to take advantage
of the opportunities they are presented with," Le says, "because
you never know how it will turn out."
Jennifer Babson, a reporter for the Boston
Globe, wrote about fuel-cell research at Northeastern in the November 1997
issue.
Return to top of
page