ORGANIZATION, SERVICES, AND STAFFING OF SELECTED UNIVERSITY PLACEMENT AND COOPERATIVE EDUCATION OFFICE

This study describes the organization, services and staffing of placement and cooperative education offices in selected universities and concludes with recommendations regarding the possibilities for combining placement and co-op offices. Placement, co-op, and combined placement/co-op directors at 29 public research universities which administered optional co-op programs were surveyed. The survey instrument was also sent to the persons under the combined directors who were primarily responsible for the co-op program. The selection criteria for inclusion in this study was that the co-op programs must have had 50% or more of their co-op students who were engineering majors and 60% or more of the co-op students who were working on alternating co-op work schedules.;While the primary purpose of the study was to examine the pros and cons of combining placement and co-op offices, other organizational issues were explored (e.g., current and preferred reporting channels; centralized versus decentralized issues; and specialization versus combination of functions of professional staff members).;Given a list of services and seminars, respondents were asked to indicate those services and seminars which they provided in their current offices and to indicate those which they would provide in an ideal situation.;The staffing section reports various demographic data, experience factors, and faculty status of the professional staff. Staff sizes for 1985-86 of the respective placement, co-op, and combined offices were compared with projected staff sizes for the 1987-88 school year. Staff sizes were compared with such factors as university enrollment, engineering enrollment, organizational structure, number of students served by category, etc.;While respondents were mixed in terms of their opinions of the various advantages and disadvantages of combining placement and co-op and in terms of their recommendations for combining placement and co-op, an overwhelming percentage of the placement and combined directors favored combining the offices. However, a significant majority of the co-op directors were opposed to a combined office. The researcher provided recommendations for those considering the pros and cons of combining placement and cooperative education offices.