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Cooperative Engineering Education Program

William B. Krantza, Kettil Cedercreutzb, Anthony F. Dardy b a Department of Chemical Engineering b Division of Professional Practice University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH 45221-0171

1 Introduction

Each year the first co-author (WBK) tries to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for Engineering Education because it serves to remind him why he really entered academia. ASEE caters to his highest ideals insofar as his profession is concerned. He is a lso highly motivated to present a paper at the annual ASEE meeting on some subject concerning pedagogy or other aspect of engineering education. The impetus for this paper came from the first co-author’s recent move from the University of Colorado where he spent 32 years on the faculty to the University of Cincinnati where he just completed his 2 nd year on the faculty. This co-author has been particularly impressed with the Engineering Cooperative Education Program at the University of Cincinnati, which has no counterpart at the University of Colorado.

This paper was inspired by a recent experience of the first co-author in which he had the opportunity to teach the same pediment graduate course, which also served as a technical elective for seniors, at both the University of Colorado and the University of Cincinnati. The subject of the course was “Fundamentals of Membrane Science and Technology”. The enrollment was similar at both Colorado and Cincinnati, namely about 50:50 graduate and undergraduate students. It is rare that one has the opportunity to teach the same course at two different universities. Indeed, it offers the opportunity to make some interesting comparisons! In teaching this course for the first time at Cincinnati, the first co -author decided to do something that he never would do if he were teaching the course again at the same University, namely to give the same set of hour exams (two) and final exam. He did this to provide some metric to compare the students at Colorado and Cincinnati. When he taught this course at Colorado, the graduate students outscored the undergraduates rather handily, as might be expected. Interestingly, when he taught this course at Cincinnati, the undergraduates outscored the graduate students! At first, he thought that this was an indication that Colorado recruited better graduate students than Cincinnati. However, this is easy to check via GRE scores and undergraduate class rank. If anything, the graduate students at Cincinnati looked better on paper, possibly beca use Cincinnati recruited more international students for their graduate program than did Colorado (because Cincinnati allows nonresident tuition waivers for international graduate students but Colorado does not). In looking into this interesting comparison, he attributed the success of the undergraduates at Cincinnati to the fact that they had the opportunity to participate in a cooperative education program, which was not possible at Colorado. In the opinion of the first co-author, the mandatory Engineering Cooperative Education Program at Cincinnati produces a more professionally mature engineering student by the time they reach their senior year.

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Dardy, A., & Krantz, W., & Cedercreutz, K. (2002, June), Cooperative Engineering Education Program Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10321