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Co-op's supporters see no harm in being practical, however. Asa S. Knowles, Northeastern's president, calls co-op a "distinctly American philosophy of higher education," and he adds: "We attract the student who is career-oriented and hungry for practical education."
Typical is Alan Biren, 23, of Roslyn, N.Y., a marketing major whose father is a salesman of printing equipment. He alternated study with selling groceries and toilet goods for Armour-Dial Inc., and he plans to join the company full time after graduation this June for about 20% more pay than a graduate of a traditional four-year college would receive. "The best thing I've learned," Biren says of his student career, "is how to communicate in selling." Scholars might grumble at such a judgment, but Biren's wife Sandra, a former Northeastern student herself, explains: "He's much more business-oriented than intellectual, and his work experience helped him do better in school by giving him a goal."
Other Northeasterners also stress the practical advantages of co-op education. Says Calvin True, 25, a law student who spent last term as a probate clerk: "Coop gives you practical experience in a field in which you desire to practice, and you know what you want to do when you graduate." Alan Kandel, a management major who worked as an accountant, agrees. "I have friends in other schools who take summer jobs, and I know I'm way ahead of them."
The greatest practical advantages of coop, however, accrue to the colleges that adopt it. Northeastern officials estimate that co-op education enables them to maintain a campus only two-thirds the size that would otherwise be necessary for a student body as big as theirs. And their co-op students earn some $25 million a year; if that sum were needed for scholarships, it would require an endowment of several hundred millions. With such benefits available, financially pressed educators can hardly help regarding the co-op movement with increasing favor.