Co-op for the twenty-first century

The Power of Experience

Flash back a few decades to a typical conversation about Northeastern. Invariably, someone would say, "Oh, isn’t that the co-op school?"

That’s because "Northeastern" and "co-op" went hand in hand, a time-honored pairing as intertwined as "bread" with "butter."

These days, though, Northeastern’s movers and shakers are trying to get a slightly different message across: Co-op, introduced at the university in 1909, remains the yang to Northeastern’s yin, but it’s been augmented by several other forms of experiential learning.

The idea, university officials say, is to offer students a broader palette of real-world experiences. MORE >>