Melanie Feinman plans to take five years to graduate from college, a year more than many students.
The Columbia 20-year-old is not taking her time. Along with hundreds of thousands of students across the country, she is enrolled in a cooperative education program -- in which students spend half their collegiate careers in the classroom and half "co-oping" or working in jobs in their fields of study to gain practical experience.
Beginning in 1906 at the University of Cincinnati, cooperative education is still a relatively unknown method of organizing undergraduate education in this country. Its goal is to prepare students for the post-graduate world of work.
The three largest universities in the country that require many of their students to alternate periods of study with work are the University of Cincinnati, Northeastern University in Boston, and Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Data from the national Cooperative Education Association indicate that co-op enrollment has been holding steady or slightly rising during the past three or four years.
However, many colleges are reporting that their co-op programs are overloaded, says Dawn Pettit, executive director of the association.
According to a 1991 poll -- the most recent taken by the association -- about 250,000 students were enrolled in co-op undergraduate and graduate programs. At least 600 colleges and universities across the country offer co-oping as an option.
Employers recognize the potential of co-op education, says Polly Hutcheson, vice president of the National Commission for Cooperative Education.
About 50,000 co-op employers around the country -- including 83 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500 list -- are employers of co-op students, she says.
She adds that a large segment of the co-op employers are in the technical fields -- engineering, computer science and business -- but over the years available employers have expanded to embrace nearly every major.
Feinman, a 1994 Howard High School graduate and a junior at Northeastern University, is studying nursing. She has spent the past two summer and fall co-op periods working at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
She began her academic career in a more traditional program at the University of South Carolina, but after her freshman year intentionally sought a school with cooperative education.
"I wanted the experience," Feinman says "I wanted to know if nursing was what I really wanted to do. And [through co-op] I have learned so much hands-on stuff that I couldn't learn in books or in the classroom."
The major drawback of co-op, says Carol Lyons, dean of the Department of Career Services at Northeastern University, is that a cooperative education program takes longer to complete -- usually five or six years -- than a standard four-year college program.
However, she adds: "What many don't realize is that most people who attend college in this day and age don't graduate in four years, even if they are attending a four-year school. So not only do co-op students graduate at about the same rate as other students, they have job experience in their field to boot."
Lyons says that, among Northeastern co-op students who graduated in 1995, more than 90 percent were employed within six months of graduation. "Very few people who go through co-op can't find a job within a few months of graduation," she says.
Most cooperative education programs began in the field of engineering and slowly expanded into business. Today, students can co-op somewhere in nearly every major, from English and history to molecular biology.
"The biggest advantage to co-op is that it obviously gives the student a serious competitive edge upon graduation," says Sam Sovilla, associate provost and director of the division of professional practice at the University of Cincinnati. "More importantly, though, it teaches the student to work and study side by side. In the high-tech world today you have to keep learning to be competitive or you become obsolete."
Students who participate in co-op have the opportunity to travel all over the country -- and the world -- for their jobs.
John Adamek, a University of Cincinnati student from Kent, Ohio, is working this summer at Penza Architects Inc. in Baltimore. He is in his fourth year of the six-year architecture program at UC.
"I didn't want to stay near school," Adamek says of working in the Baltimore area. "My last assignment was in Nashville and that was a good experience, too. I learned what it is like -- day to day -- to be an architect, dealing with clients and deadlines."
Adamek acknowledges another drawback to participating in a co-op program. "Friendships end and change when you have to move every three months," he says.
At the Cooperative Education Association, Pettit predicts that many companies will be recruiting solely through co-op programs by the end of the century.
