Co- Operative Programs

If You are looking for means to pay for a college education and get a career off to a good head start, look into an increasingly popular program called cooperative education. It is an excellent way for a student to help finance his or her own education while gaining expertise in a chosen field at the same time. Students alternate terms on campus with terms working at a real job. Last year, more than 270,000 young adults took advantage of such programs at some 1,100 colleges.

In a typical program a student takes a responsible job with a company that has agreed to participate in the arrangement. Students often work as trainees, and they earn up to $12,000 on the average for a year's work. Some of these earnings, minus taxes, are usually figured into the student's financial aid package back at school, and the grants and loans he would otherwise need may not be necessary.

The students commonly find that time spent on the job is a terrific boon to their careers. They usually receive no academic credit for their work, but they learn skills firsthand. Many positions become full time after graduation, and pay a much higher salary than a less experienced applicant could expect.

Co op jobs are scarcer, and salaries much lower, for humanities students than for technical students. Most co op students are in business administration, computer science, other hard sciences and engineering. The biggest employer is the federal government. It put nearly 25,000 students to work in the 2006 - 07 school year. And the government usually keeps 68% of its students on the payroll after graduation.