CHANGING TIMES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN EMPIRICAL LOOK AT COOPERATIVE EDUCATION AND LIBERAL ARTS FACULTY

These are times when the winds of change are blowing hard in higher education. "Out of this ferment and debate comes renewed attention to 'excellence' in the teaching/learning process and a new focus on the importance of active, experience-based learning." (Stanton 1991) Students are demanding relevance in their educations, especially within the liberal arts. And just as some things change radically, some things remain the same; "Those who are, or have been, involved in the administration of a cooperative program know that faculty involvement is critical to the success of their program" (Barbeau 1980). Many cooperative education programs around the world are facing issues attendant to these problems of change and the importance of faculty support. How does one keep cooperative education vital in a time when educational, economic and political interests are moving to new ground?

In the specific setting for this research, a cooperative education program that places more than 250 liberal arts students each year, we take a descriptive, empirical look at faculty support and involvement with the goal of even greater participation. The first author places about 100 LAS students in jobs each fall and spring semester and more than 50 students in the summer. The students come from 17 different departments with as many as 40 different faculty advisors and these students work in about 70 different employment settings. In spite of these numbers and the relative strength of the specific program, there are many LAS faculty who hold negative opinions about cooperative education and applied learning. Faculty turnover, new administrators, and the evolution of new academic units requires the constant recruitment and maintenance of liberal arts faculty support.

The purpose of this descriptive research is (a) to explain the existing structure and dynamics of a very successful LAS program in cooperative education, (b) to develop scales that measure faculty attitudes toward and information about cooperative education, and (c) to present findings that bear upon the question "How can improved support for cooperative education among LAS faculty be achieved?"

Literature Review

"Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand." A CHINESE PROVERB

If there is some truth in these thoughts, and we add to them the current conditions of change in American higher education, the problems facing cooperative education programs become quite evident. The 1980's can be looked upon as a time of questioning the nature of undergraduate education in the U.S. (Stanton 1991 ). In the aftermath of this decade curricular reform has come in general education as well liberal arts and sciences. Students are demanding greater practicality from their undergraduate experiences, and universities are seriously reflecting on the traditional values that have kept learning-and-work as anathema. Most recently in this process, we have discovered "service learning" as a way to bring democratic, pedagogical, and practical values together for undergraduates.

The debate within liberal arts and sciences, which brings the role of cooperative education into sharp focus, is far from over. van der Vorm (1991) states the positive side of the debate:

Cooperative education has been establishing its rightful place within liberal arts education during the past two decades. The documented outcomes of cooperative educational experiences include developing self-confidence, expanding the capacity for cooperation and accepting responsibility. They also include the broader intangibles such as building character and becoming a useful member of society (p. 70).

Similarly, Stanton (1991) interprets national reports on the undergraduate experience as criticizing "the passive and impersonal nature of instructional methodologies" and "calling for a pedagogy that is more active and involving," enabling learners "to take more responsibility for their education," and engaging them to come in "direct contact with the subjects of their study." (p.60)

The negative side of the debate documents resistance to such ideas and can be found in McNutt (1989):

The modest, even spartan increase of faculty sponsorship for cooperative education over the past twenty-five years has had a negative impact on enrollments and the integration of co-op courses in most degree programs (p.23).

Ricks, et al. (1993) and van der Vorm (1988) document that faculty typically "do not recognize work as a vehicle for learning and view cooperative education as anti-intellectual" (p. 121 ). Even within a university that has embraced the value of cooperative education, Northeastern University in Boston with the largest program in the country, we find that the coop experience is required for everyone in the university except the liberal arts where "elitist attitudes" prevent its full acceptance (Watkins 1993). "Benign indifference and skepticism" are the views among many faculty and administrators (Abitia 1985). Clearly, we have yet to resolve all the impediments to institutionalizing cooperative education in our university and liberal arts settings, and the debate continues …

Successful cooperative education programs housed in the liberal arts are documented in several instances, however. Wyatt and McGee (1985) describe the successful unfolding of a comprehensive program at the University of Iowa. Lazarus (1986) shows that Montclaire State College initiated a very successful program that depended upon the support and involvement of the faculty Newman and Watts (1989) used a community psychology class to model the integration of liberal arts and cooperative education at Antioch College. Matson and Matson (1992) developed and evaluated a program that used liberal arts and science cooperative education students as change agents in a community's effort to decrease high school truancy. These successful liberal arts programs make it clear that cooperative education can and does work for many universities. Yet, how do faculty in liberal arts view cooperative education? Do the LAS faculty who choose to participate as academic advisors in the co-op experience do so in a general climate of hostility or support? If we study a liberal arts faculty, what can we learn about improving participation among these most reluctant and tradition-bound academics?

Methodology

A mailed questionnaire was sent to all of 234 LAS teaching faculty in a comprehensive university with an enrollment of about 15,000 students. A copy of the questionnaire is attached. Sixty-seven of the questionnaires were returned and usable, a return rate of 29%. The questionnaire included items about attitudes toward cooperative education, information about co-op, and faculty background and demographic items.

The sample of respondents had the following characteristics: 40% of the faculty were assistant professors, 31 % were associate professors, and 12 % were full professors. Twenty-five percent were women, and 66% had been employed while undergraduates. The mean age of the sample was 47 years. Forty-two percent had been advisors for cooperative education students in their departments. There was a fairly even distribution of faculty from the three divisions of the College of Liberal Arts; humanities, social sciences, and math/natural sciences.

Findings

The data bearing on the first purpose for this research are presented to explain the structure and dynamics of an LAS program in cooperative education. At Wichita State University, cooperative education places nearly 900 students per year from six different colleges . . . Business, Education, Engineering, Fine Arts, Health Professions, and Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Cooperative Education Program has been active at WSU for nearly 15 years.

Between 250 and 260 LAS majors are placed by the LAS Cooperative Education Coordinator each year. These students are put into jobs relevant to their majors, work with a faculty advisor from that department with whom the learning objectives are developed, are paid between $4.25 and $9.00 per hour by their place of employment, have an on-site evaluation by the coordinator, are evaluated in writing by their work supervisor, and both evaluations shared with the faculty advisor at the end of the term. While not all of the departments in the College of Liberal Arts participate regularly in co-op, there are fifteen to twenty departments who do. Typically, several members in each department readily take co-op students and several refuse to do so. The co-op coordinator must carefully navigate the changing and sometimes hostile currents in departmental waters. One or two departments enroll as many as fifteen students per semester, most departments one to three students, and several departments none. A few of the departments allow three or six hours of cooperative education credit to count toward the major, and a few departments extend the cooperative education option to their graduate students on a very restricted basis.

This co-op program is strongly supported by the central administration and the deans in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Recent changes in the presidency and vice-presidency of the institution have significantly raised the importance of the cooperative education program. It is being seen as an important part of our "metropolitan advantage" and used to recruit students to the university in films and other advertising media. More than mere lip service is given to cooperative education by the LAS college administration indicated by the standardized course and number used by the college and nearly every department therein. In the College of Liberal Arts, students may enroll in 1 to 4 hours credit each semester, with nearly all enrolling in the three-hour course. This provides significant credit hour production to the college; about 300 hours in a typical semester. LAS policy allows up to twelve hours of cooperative education to count toward graduation. Most of the students placed from LAS are in the social science division. Many social agencies want co-op students from these fields. Co-op students work with children through Big Brothers and Sisters, correctional settings, and children's homes. Others work in human service delivery at adoption centers, law offices, women's crisis centers, etc. The humanities students are placed in agencies like museums. Several math and natural science students are placed in actuarial positions, plating companies, foundries, and businesses interested in the environment. Many computer science students are placed in large companies like AT&T and IBM, as well as federal agencies like the FAA. Most are in concurrent placements. A few have alternating placements.

There are several different dimensions to the LAS Coordinator's job. Developing and maintaining a positive academic and political climate in the college and among the departmental faculty amounts to a significant portion of the coordinator's work. Job development in the many areas of interest among such a diverse group of students is literally endless. Sometimes the job development activity is met with success, sometimes it is not. At any point in time, there are about twice as many students who want jobs as are placed. From time to time it is necessary to recruit students by announcing the availability of specific jobs through class presentations that target certain majors and by advertising in the student paper. Student career counseling is also an important element in the coordinator's time. Regular data collection, writing reports, completing research projects, and actively participating in campus academic life round out the list of coordinator activities. Each of these in their own way contributes to the relative success of the LAS program in cooperative education and raises the profile of the unit on campus … everbattling the desire to keep co-op in a peripheral position (van der Vorm 1988).

The second set of findings relates to "the construction of scales measuring attitudes toward and information LAS faculty have about cooperative education." The scales were developed from a set of eighteen items on the mailed questionnaire written to assess attitudes and information. Likert-type items had five response categories ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree." As can be seen from Table 1, both scales have excellent reliabilities as measured by Chronbach' s Alpha, a split-half method. Several items were deleted to bring the alpha values to their maximum, leaving five items in the "INFORM" scale and ten items in the" ATTITUDE" scale. With these reliabilities, there is reason to have confidence in the unidimensionality of both scales. It is hoped that others in cooperative education might use the measures to assess attitudes toward the program on their campus and provide comparative data.

Table 1
Scales and Reliabilities of Liberal Arts and Science Faculty Questionnaire

¹Variable # corresponds to the item number on the questionnaire in Append ix 1.

The final set of findings brings evidence to bear on the third purpose of the article: "How can improved support among LAS faculty be achieved? " The overall attitudes of the respondents toward cooperative education are positive. The mean value of each item on the ATTITUDE scale is 3.6, on a five-point maximum. "Neutral" would be 3.0 and "agree" would be 4.0. The mean score for each item on the INFORM scale is 2.5 suggesting that the LAS faculty feel poorly informed about the cooperative education program. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the ATTITUDE and INFORM scale shows a modest, positive correlation r=.385, p=.002, that suggests the greater the information about the program, the more positive the attitude faculty carry. The regular dissemination of information about the program would likely pay dividends.

A second, and related question, is "Who among the faculty have the most positive attitudes toward cooperative education?" While we expected to find the most affirming attitudes toward co-op among faculty from the social science division, this was not so. The statistical measure, Student's t, showed that while the social sciences had more positive attitudes toward and information about co-op, they were not significantly better than the humanities or the math/natural sciences divisions. Similarly, even those faculty who had served as faculty advisors for co-op sh1dents, while better informed, did not have better attitudes than those who had never been advisors. The gender of LAS faculty did not show significant differences on the ATTITUDE or INFORM scale either. Those faculty with current administrative appointments, chairs of departments for instance, are significantly better informed about co-op, t=l.97, P=.05, but their attitudes toward co-op are not distinguishable from the regular teaching faculty. Contrary to expectations, departments with active internship programs that might compete with cooperative education for jobs and students do not differ from departments without internship programs.

Several significant findings regarding the INFORM and ATTJTUDE scales were found during the analysis. Age of the faculty members correlated positively with INFORM, r=.317, p=.02, and correlated negatively with ATTITUDE, r=-.300, p=.03. Age in this case reflects the amount of time at the institution and helps to explain why one might be better informed. The negative correlation between age and attitudes about co-op probably speaks to a more "traditional" set of values among older faculty.

A significant relationship between having served as a faculty advisor for co-op students and length of time at WSU is presented in Table 2. The relationship clearly suggests that faculty who have been in the institution between four and seventeen years are more likely to serve as co-op advisors than those who have been on staff less than four years or more than 17 years. The young, yet to-be-tenured faculty rightfully have their interests on research and publication and only 19%, of the sample in this category have served as an advisor. The group of faculty with the largest number of years of service have 50% serving as faculty advisors. Sixty-two percent of the group who have between four and seventeen years at the institution say they have served as cooperative education student advisors. The "best" time to recruit faculty is related to how much time they have been in the university … those faculty near or immediately after the six-year tenure review point are most amenable to participation.

Table 2
Crosstabulation Showing Chi-Square Relationship Between "Years at WSU" and "Been a Faculty Advisor"

The most interesting and important findings were generated from comparisons between the way the individual faculty member "felt about cooperative education" and the perceptions faculty held about their department, college, and the university attitudes toward co-op. Table 3 shows the different means for the faculty's personal perceptions, based on a ten-point scale, and the related statistical significance of these means.

Table 3
Comparison of Personal Feelings about Co-op (Var. 19) with Perceived Feelings of Department (Var. 20), College (Var. 21) and University (Var. 22)

¹Variable # refers to the item number of the questionnaire in Appendix 1
²p < .05
³p < .001

Their personal attitudes toward cooperative education are obviously more positive than the perceptions they hold of their department, the college, and even the university. Interestingly, the individual faculty member believes his/her own department and college to be more hostile toward cooperative education than the university, and significantly so. This suggests that the faculty decision to participate as a co-op advisor is made in a perceived climate of antagonism and non-support of colleagues and administrators. From what is known, in fact, about the college and university administration, the perception of the faculty about these units is incorrect. Perhaps, the bastion of traditional pedagogical values in liberal arts and science, along with a few vocal professors who espouse these values, are the basis for the misperceptions. In any case, correcting the misperceptions is an important aspect of increasing faculty support in the college and the university

In summary, the findings bearing on the question of improved participation among LAS faculty are diverse and revealing. Faculty attitudes toward cooperative education do not differ by their division (humanities, social sciences. math/natural sciences), by gender, whether they had been co-op faculty advisors or not, by type of appointment (administrative or full-time teaching), or by whether the department had an active internship program. The significant findings bearing on this question show that age of the faculty is correlated with more information about co-op but is negatively correlated with attitudes toward co-op. Length of time at the institution supports the age finding and suggests that recruiting younger faculty as cooperative education student advisors is optimal near or just past the tenure decision (5 to 15 years). Finally, respondent-faculty perceptions about the feelings toward co-op held by their department, college, and the university administration are significantly more negative than their own. In many cases at this university, these are misperceptions.

Discussion

Perhaps at no other time in the eighty-year history of cooperative education has there been a period of such change and opportunity. Many universities and colleges have begun successfully the "institutionalization" of co-op. So that we not become "isolated and peripheral to the scholarly and academic life of the university as the aerobics instructor and as vulnerable" (Blake 1987), faculty must become involved in a specific process of articulating the pedagogical value of experiential learning into the curriculum (van der Vorm 1988; McNutt 1989). It seems reasonable to conclude that finding out about the faculty, their attitudes and ideas regarding cooperative education, is an important first step in this process.

This research found that among LAS faculty, traditionally the most reluctant to participate in cooperative education (Watkins 1993), there is positive support from a diverse group of faculty in LAS, but there is a lack of information about co-op. Importantly, a misperception that their own department, college, and university administration hold hostile and non-supportive views toward the program persists among these faculty members. Finally, the cooperative education program described above has enjoyed the fruits of university and college administrative support for the past few years, and the program has grown. Cooperative education is a focal point of the university mission that markets the "metropolitan advantage" to our community, businesses, faculty, and students. One aspect of the continued success has been keeping cooperative education and the "cooperative education specialists" (McNutt 1989) as an academic unit and not tying them to a "career center" or "student services." Further growth depends on the increased participation among LAS faculty whose support is being affected by the changing winds in American higher education. Achieving the goal of greater faculty participation and, ultimately, full institutionalization of cooperative education into the university requires the faculty to "interpret the university's mission" and "assist students in relating their experiences to broader social issues and to liberal arts disciplines" (Stanton 1991, P.63). We will be closer to accomplishing this goal when we understand how to target LAS faculty with the willingness to take part in our collective venture.