To understand students' own level of awareness or knowledge of cooperative education and the features or advantages this educational approach offers them, StudentPoll asked respondents, on an open-ended basis, to tell us what they knew about co-op/cooperative education. This question was posed to those students who said they had heard of co-op/cooperative education.

Nearly one-quarter described cooperative education as an opportunity to work with people in your field of interest and gain valuable career-related experience. Another 13 percent described cooperative education as a way for them to get a grade and college credit while working. Twelve percent said co-op gave them the opportunity to take a class and obtain a job related to that particular course. However, when pressed, nearly one-third of those indicating that they had heard of co-op/cooperative education, reported that they didn't remember or didn't know anything about co-op.

To understand students' perceptions about cooperative education and internships, StudentPoll read them a series of statements and asked them to indicate whether they completely agreed, somewhat agreed, somewhat disagreed, completely disagreed or didn't know/weren't sure how to respond to the statement. Before reading each statement, we explained that cooperative education allowed students to experience different career-related jobs that help pay for their college education. Then we described internships as opportunities for students to gain career-related experiences, but not necessarily for pay.

Overall, these findings reveal that a majority of the students surveyed have very positive perceptions about cooperative education, agreeing that it "is better than internships because it would help you pay for your college education" and that "students who participate in co-op are highly motivated and intelligent." In fact, students expressed the strongest level of agreement with the statement about co-op providing a way to help finance a college education: More than three-quarters of students surveyed completely or somewhat agreed that co-op education is better than internships because it can help pay for a college education.

For a not insignificant number of students, the availability of cooperative education would have made them more likely to apply to that institution.