COOPERATIVE EDUCATION AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT AT CENTRAL STATE AND WILBERFORCE UNIVERSITIES

This thesis study was funded by a dissertation grant from the United Negro College Fund, Inc.;The problem of the study was twofold: (1) to identify and examine the career patterns of cooperative and non-cooperative education alumni from Central State University and Wilberforce University; (2) to describe the career preparation and career development effects of the undergraduate curricula and their impact on the alumni of these universities.;There are three major reasons why this study is significant: (1) no other study has focused on a detailed description and analysis of cooperative education at two Black colleges; (2) fifty percent of all public and private Black colleges administer cooperative education programs; and (3) twenty-three percent of all cooperative education students enrolled at UNCF member colleges attend Wilberforce University.;The plan of analysis was comparative and was conducted from three perspectives: (1) the organization of the academic program and administrative support systems at the two institutions; (2) the attitudes of alumni regarding nurturance, if any, that the academic program and administrative support systems made in their careers; and, (3) variations in achievement and other objective indicators of career development of the alumni of the two institutions.;The literature relevant to the problem under examination was organized into two major areas dealing with career development in a college setting and college graduate career outcomes. These areas were: (1) empirical and conceptual literature on cooperative education; (2) empirical literature on Black college graduates and their careers.;The study employed two data gathering methods to obtain information: (1) survey methodology for alumni, and (2) semi-structured personal interviews of significant individuals who are responsible for the administration of the two learning environments.;The population being studied consisted of a sample of individuals who graduated from either Central or Wilberforce between 1971 and 1979. In total, 157 alumni responded to the survey questionnaire.;The data obtained from the alumni questionnaires were analyzed by applying a series of appropriate statistical techniques. A series of comparisons was made across the groups under investigation to determine the significance, if any, for the variables being studied.;The data obtained from the personal interviews were analyzed by categorizing and coding the interviewee responses according to the conceptual framework from an institutional change model for adopting a cooperative education program.;In summary, the major findings of the study indicate that both the cooperative education alumni and non-cooperative education alumni in this study had undergraduate academic and work experiences at Central and Wilberforce that prepared them for their post-undergraduate career development. Further, the cooperative education alumni in this study tended to work more in private companies, earn more income, and have more job promotions and salary increases than the Wilberforce cooperative education alumni and Central non-cooperative education alumni on their first full-time job. The cooperative education alumni from the mandatory program at Wilberforce, however, are currently earning more money annually than the cooperative education alumni from the optional program at Central and the non-cooperative education alumni at Central.;Cooperative education programs are administered in over one-half of the nation's predominantly Black colleges. The results of this study show that future research should be geared toward examining the development of cooperative education at a sizeable number of predominantly Black post-secondary institutions and assessing the career development effects of cooperative education on the alumni of these institutions.