When I went home for Christmas, I went back to my university to visit professors, friends, and old co-workers. I spent a good amount of time chatting with folks from the Department of Co-operative Education, where I worked for almost five years. As I talked to people, there seemed to be a little bit of doom and gloom in the air. I dug a little deeper, and it seemed like enrollment in co-operative education was drastically down compared to its glory days.
For those who are unfamiliar with co-operative education, it's basically a program where you spend a couple semesters working in the real world for school credit. It offers an excellent way to apply some of theory you've learned in academia, and it gives you a chance to make connections with people in industry. A computer science student (back in my day) typically spent five semesters working at a co-op job. In my experience, it was a pretty good deal because you managed to add 20 months of work experience to your resume, and you got a chance to make some money too. A study also revealed that 90% of co-op students found a job after university within 6 months of graduation. I am one of those fortunate people that falls into this category.
In the old days, the Department of Computer Science at UVIC used to have around 400 students enrolled in co-op. Competition was always extremely fierce, and demand for jobs outstripped supply. It was always nerve wracking when you were trying to find a co-op job because you didn't know if you were going to be working or going to school in the next semester. Also, if all your friends went out on a co-op work term, and you didn't, your academic schedule would become unsynchronized with theirs, and that was not fun.
Fast forward to today, and apparently enrollment is about half of what it was. Only around 200 computer science students are enrolled in the co-op program. The supply of jobs far outstrips demand. Employers are constantly complaining that students are not applying to their jobs, and this is even the case for big name employers. Students these days also seem to be very picky about what kind of work they do, whereas in my day, we were glad to get any kind of work.
During my time working in the co-op department, I had the opportunity of interviewing many students. Usually we got a pile of resumes, and shortlisted eight candidates. As time went on, we discovered the quality of our applicants were getting lower and lower. It eventually got so bad that we just stopped trying to hire co-op students because it was too hard to find/attract good talent. We had so many students fail our most basic programming questions that even professors were alarmed by what we were finding. I'm not quite sure why the quality of students was dropping, but I can easily fingerpoint and blame the java-ification of academia. (Commence flame war).
Near the end of my reign in co-op, I remember running some statistics on co-op students. The department wanted to figure out how many jobs did a co-op student apply to on average per semester. I crunched the numbers, and people in my cohort (ie the old guard) used to apply to about 12 jobs per semester. The current group of students only applied to 3 jobs per semester.
It got me pondering, what's wrong with this picture. Why are students applying to fewer jobs? Why is the quality of job applicants declining? Why are there fewer students enrolling into co-op each year?
I have to say, co-operative education was probably one of the most important components of my education. It illuminated the things I learned in the workplace, and it helped me understand the things I was learning in academia. It gave context to what I was learning as I can say, ah.... that's why I'm learning about this cryptic computer science thing, it can be used in this situation. It also helped pay the bills for school.
Thoughts? Comments? Flames?
