Request for Research Ideas
In the next several months StudentPoll will field a new national research
study with high school seniors planning to attend college in the fall of 2005.
In order to cover timely, critical issues of greatest concern to senior enrollment
professionals and other institutional decision makers, we want to hear from you.
Email us your ideas and thoughts about issues or questions that you would like to
see included in our research study and reported in future issues of StudentPoll.
Email your research ideas to Richard Hesel or Kate Cleary at: Hesel@artsci.com or
Cleary@artsci.com. We will take all submissions into consideration.
You can expect to receive new issues of StudentPoll beginning in late fall 2004.
The deadline for submitting research questions/ideas is May 17, 2004. We hope to hear
from you and other subscribers who value the timely, enrollment-related news and information
StudentPoll has provided higher education for nearly a decade.
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With many families facing hard
economic times, college and university financial aid budgets stretched to the
breaking point, and increasing numbers of students assuming staggering debt to
get through college, an educational model that’s often been treated with
disdain by the academy is gaining new advocates on many campuses. It’s called
cooperative education (co-op), a program of study that combines classroom
studies with paid, meaningful work experience in a field related to a student’s
major or career interests.
In this issue of StudentPoll, we explore students’ knowledge of co-op and the particular benefits and features
they most strongly associate with it. Often viewed with suspicion by faculty
due to what many see as its “trade school”, career-related emphasis,
cooperative education, as the findings in this issue of StudentPoll reveal,
has come of age as a learn-work-and-earn path to a college degree. Co-op is
appealing to students across all levels of academic ability, partly because it
gives them a practical, effective way to pay for college without bankrupting
their futures.
Our findings defy much of the conventional wisdom, which associates co-op with lower-status colleges and
weaker students. In fact, a majority of the students we surveyed associate
co-op with highly intelligent, motivated students and prestigious colleges and
universities. A majority consider co-op superior to internships because it
helps students pay for their college education. Even students with the highest
SAT and ACT scores (SATs of 1270+ and ACTs of 26+) agreed that cooperative
education is offered at prestigious schools. The collective findings of the research
make several conclusions quite clear:
Students want career-related experience, they don’t assume all good
colleges offer internships, and they view cooperative education as a serious
and significant option in college consideration and choice.
With no end in sight to
skyrocketing tuition hikes at public and private institutions and the cost of a
college education climbing beyond the reach of more and more families and
students, cooperative education may indeed prove to be a good choice and
excellent financial solution for those intent on leaving college with
significant career experience and without a mountain of debt.
Richard A. Hesel
Publisher, StudentPoll
Principal, Art & Science Group, LLC
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