Career exploration via cooperative educationand lifespan occupational choice

Patricia L. Linn,*,1 Jane Ferguson,2 and Katie Egart3

post-graduate jobs in occupational functions and contexts they had explored as co-op students.

High levels of individuality in use of the co-op program and in career paths were found. Four co-

Foundation grant to Antioch College. Thanks to the graduates who participated, Bob Devine, Nina

Myatt, Scott Sanders, Charlene Templeman, Jonah Liebert, Rachel Fischer, Toni Severance, and

Antiochs Cooperative Education Faculty. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toPatricia L. Linn, J.D. Dawson Professor of Cooperative Education, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH

45387. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to plinn@antioch-college.edu.2 Contributed to this project while serving as a co-op research assistant; present address: Department

y Honors Program,

Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447

www.elsevier.com/locate/jvbof Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.3 Present address: Coordinator, Urban Leadership Internship Program, Universitop-to-career patterns were described, based on the degree to which functions and contexts were

explored during college and career; a case study was included to exemplify each pattern. Gender

dierences were revealed in the patterns, but not the group data. Job context was particularly

important in dening these patterns. Implications for research and practice were discussed

*Corresponding author.

E-mail address: plinn@antioch-college.edu (P.L. Linn).1 This study was supported by research awards from the Pierson Lovelace Foundation, Cooperative

Education and Internship Association, Midwest Cooperative Education and Internship Association,

Cooperative Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education, National

Association of Student Employment Administrators, Antioch College Faculty Fund, and a MacArthurAntioch College, Cooperative Education, Yellow Springs, OH 45387, USA

Received 14 January 2003

Available online 11 December 2003

Abstract

Career exploration by Antioch College students who graduated between 1946 and 1955

(N 73) was studied to determine relationships between the occupational categories of cooper-ative education jobs taken in college (obtained from a campus archive) and subsequent work his-

tories (obtained from surveying the graduates at about 70 years). Five hypotheses were tested.

Results supported four of the hypotheses, with partial support for the fth. Co-op jobs taken

by the sample represented each of 23 occupational classications, and most graduates took102 Bishop Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA.

0001-8791/$ - see front matter 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2003.10.002

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 431tentatively, however given the lack of a control group, characteristics of the study sample, and

particularities of the historical era studied, the ability to generalize beyond the study sample is

limited.

2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Career exploration; Cooperative education; Occupational category; Lifespan; Work-based

learning; Career history; Career planning; Standard Occupational Classication

1. Introduction

Career exploration is an important kind of vocational behavior that includes learn-

ing about the self and from the environment to help decide about a career direction, to

ease adjustment to work, and to enhance performance (Blustein, 1992; Jordaan, 1963;

Strumpf, Colarelli, & Hartman, 1983). Two factors identied as important to careerexploration include its developmental timing and the quality of interventions designed

to enhance it. Although career exploration may occur throughout life (Super, 1990),

adolescence is a particularly important stage for career exploration, because many in-

dividuals in the US are choosing vocations and making various levels of commitment

to those choices at that time (Blustein, 1989; Jepsen & Dickson, 2003). In terms of in-

terventions in support of career exploration, one important aspect is how comprehen-

sive the intervention is. Phillips (1992) reviewed career counseling research and

concluded that when career exploration interventions include self-assessment, feed-back, specic and general information about work, and advice on career decision

making, more signicant gains are achieved than when interventions are more nar-

rowly focused. Blustein (1997) advocated recently for even more comprehensive inter-

ventions. He encouraged counselors to help clients develop an exploratory attitude:

an open and nonrigid way of relating to the world such that one is able to approach

the vast number of new situations and changes that individuals face in a manner that

encourages growth and further self-denition (p. 270).

Given the importance of career exploration to career decision making, and the in-terest in late adolescent timing and comprehensiveness of interventions, it is surpris-

ing that undergraduate cooperative education programs have not been studied by

vocational psychologists as career exploration interventions. Colleges and universi-

ties that oer cooperative education programs allow or require students to work

o-campus, either concurrently with their classes or in alternating terms. Late

adolescence is the development period when many students enroll in post-secondary

cooperative education programs.

In general, studies of the outcomes of career exploration have been disappointing,other than predictable increases in ego-identity development (Blustein, Devenis, &

Kidney, 1989). In a recent review, Blustein (1997) implicated narrow denitions

of both career exploration and relevant outcome variables in the lack of signicant

ndings. Studying cooperative education could broaden our ideas about what career

exploration means, because cooperative education programs are broadly comprehen-sive. They require multiple work terms with faculty and employer support to help the

432 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447student self-assess, develop work skills, reect on work experiences, integrate work

experiences with classroom study, and identify career preferences, pathways, and

goals. For example, one set of published criteria prescribe the scope of cooperative

education work terms (at least 30 weeks of work), credentialing (faculty award aca-

demic credit for the work and it should appear on the transcript), and evaluationof work performance (employers should evaluate performance), among other attri-

butes (Accreditation Council for Cooperative Education, 2003). The behaviors

required to complete a cooperative education (co-op) program go beyond the infor-

mation-seeking behaviors, such as talking to knowledgeable others about a particular

career, measured in the Career Exploration Survey (CES; Strumpf et al., 1983). Co-op

students work full time for several months in various jobs and, therefore, learn rst-

hand about careers. Broad career exploration is particularly likely in co-op programs

that ascribe to an environmentalmodel rather than a vocational one. In environmentalco-op programs, students are encouraged to take jobs to meet a variety of personal

and professional development goals, i.e., some co-op jobs are major-related but jobs

are chosen for other reasons as well, such as exploring urban living or to take on a

physical challenge. In a vocational co-op program, all jobs taken are closely related

to the students major. A recent qualitative study showed that learning in one environ-mental co-op program is both broad and deep, as students are repeatedly challenged

to build a life for themselves across multiple work terms in a variety of new locations,

as well as adapt to a succession of dierent work roles (Linn, 2004).Career exploration studies of cooperative education could also reduce the biases

associated with self-report: rather than asking respondents to report their own ex-

ploratory behavior with instruments such as the CES, cooperative education stu-

dents environmental- and self-exploratory behaviors are documented, credited,and assessed by faculty and employers. Cooperative education has been shown to

enhance career identity (Weston, 1986), career planning (Mueller, 1992), and career

decisions (Hackett, Croissant, & Schneider, 1992), all outcome variables relevant to

the study of career exploration.Most career exploration and cooperative education researchers have limited their

investigations to a short developmental span from the point of career exploration to

the assessment of outcomes. For example, Stumpf and Lockhart (1987) used the

CES to measure beliefs about the eectiveness of self- and environmental-explora-

tion at one point for business students, and self- and environmental-exploratory be-

haviors 46 months later. They found that the beliefs predicted the respective

behaviors. A focus on short-term follow up from exploratory behavior to outcome

may also be responsible for the absence of more clear outcome eects.Neither is the literature on cooperative education rife with long-term follow up

studies. Philip Gardners work is one exception. Gardner and his colleagues followedgraduates of Michigan States engineering cooperative education program to showhigher starting salaries (Gardner, Nixon, & Motschenbacher, 1992) and quicker so-

cialization to the rst job (Gardner & Koslowski, 1993) for those who participated in

cooperative education than those who did not. A follow-up a decade or two after

graduation showed that some of those advantages for co-op students diminishedas careers progressed (Gardner & Motschenbacher, 1997).

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 433An exception to the dearth of long-term follow-up from career exploration in ad-

olescence is the work of Jepsen and Dickson (2003). They measured the frequency of

career exploration behaviors in the 9th and 12th grades for a high school graduating

class in rural Wisconsin, and categorized how clear occupational choice was in 12th

grade. Twenty-ve years later, they looked for correlations between the high schoolmeasures and career establishment, dened by such behaviors as earning degrees, job

achievement, and tting in with co-workers. Career exploration did not predict ca-

reer establishment; occupational choice clarity predicted it only weakly. For correla-

tions to be signicant, all respondents scores have to follow a similar pattern ofvariable interrelationships. Vondracek and Kawasaki (1995) argued that . . . in or-der to have broad applicability, conceptualizations of adult career development must

reect the almost staggering variety of paths that may be chosen and pursued in the

course of any individual work life (p.111). They oered a developmental-contextualmodel that incorporates a wide array of human functions (cognitive, sensory-percep-

tual, and emotional) plus the constraints and facilitations of the environment on be-

havior. Qualitative methodology like case studies, autobiography, and interviewing

allow a full picture of an individuals career choices and achievements to be under-stood (Young & Borgen, 1990).

In this study we chose one outcome measure of career exploration: the subsequent

taking of a job in an occupational category that had been explored via a cooperative

education work experience. This outcome is relevant to educators in co-op pro-grams, because a common goal of such programs is to help students identify a kind

of work that suits them as individuals. Later work in an occupation that was ex-

plored on co-op is one measure of program success. In order to allow a long-term

follow up of exploratory behavior, we asked graduates of one private liberal arts col-

lege with mandatory cooperative education who were at or near retirement to pro-

vide detailed work histories of every job taken across their careers. For our

denition of career we borrowed from Hall (1976): the individually perceived

sequence of attitudes and behaviors associated with work-related experiences andactivities over the span of the persons life (p. 4). A campus archive provided detailsof the career explorations, i.e., all cooperative education jobs taken during the

respondents college years. The results reported here are part of a larger projectdesigned to describe processes and outcomes of cooperative education learning,

especially learning that seems important to graduates years after graduation (Linn,

1999; Linn & Ferguson, 1999).

Several hypotheses were tested:

Hypothesis 1. The study sample was drawn from a liberal arts, environmental co-op

program where broad career exploration is encouraged, therefore we predicted that

most occupational categories would be explored by the sample.

Hypothesis 2. Cooperative education programs should allow students to explore

particular career options in order to aid their career decision making and choices,

therefore we predicted that most graduates would take post-graduate jobs in thesame occupational categories of jobs they had explored on co-op.

Hypothesis 5. Our nal hypothesis was specic to gender as a social category. Work

434 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447in the US for the graduates in the era studied here was gender stereotyped, with

women encouraged to take roles as teachers or nurses, and men encouraged toconsider a broader range of work roles (Rupp & Taylor, 1987). We hypothesized

that the range of co-op job choices would be limited by gender, and that women

graduates post-graduate job choices would be determined by family role consider-ations more than would male graduates choices.

2. Methods

2.1. Sample

We randomly selected 120 Antioch College graduates from graduation years

19461955 from the Colleges alumni/ae database. The database included 1064names from this era, or 67% of those who graduated (the other graduates addresseswere unknown by the College or they were deceased). The sample was stratied to

include 50% women, although the database for this era included more than twice

as many men as women. We focused on the 194655 decade because these graduateswere at least 65 years old at the time of the study and could therefore describe and

reect upon all (or most) of their careers. A total of 73 (61% of those contacted)

agreed to participate and completed a questionnaire detailing their post-graduate

work histories. A comparison was made between the college records of 20 sampled

graduates who declined to participate, and the records of the participants. Only one

signicant dierence was found of 12 variables available for comparison: the number

of co-op jobs held, with participants completing on average one more co-op job thanHypothesis 3. Because life circumstances and social categories inuence job-taking

in addition to career concerns, we expected individual dierences in the patterns

of co-op and post-graduate job-taking. We expected correlations between the

number of occupations explored on co-op and the number of occupations taken

across the career to be near zero, reecting the individuality of job-takingpatterns.

Hypothesis 4. While the work functions to which co-op students are assigned varywidely from the mundane to the professional, co-op programs are designed to allow

students to observe and learn about career contexts in which that work function islocated. For example, a student might be assigned clerical duties, but in a law

practice. The co-op student in this situation would be encouraged to learn all that is

possible about the legal profession, not just about the functions of a clerical em-ployee. Choosing to go into law practice might follow, or choosing to be a clerk. We

expected the context of cooperative education work settings to be as relevant to later

career choices, or more so, than work functions. This meant that co-op placements

had to be categorized in terms of both work function and context.those who declined.

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 435Thirty-four (47%) of the 73 respondents were women. The mean age of the sample

was 70.6 years (SD 3:1 years) at the time of contact in 1997, ranging from 65 to 81years. Most were European-American, as was the Antioch student body in that era;

two respondents were African-American women, and two were Japanese-American

women.

2.2. Setting and program

Antioch College is a residential, liberal arts college with a mandatory cooperative

education program. The cooperative education program follows an environmental

model, and was designed by engineer Arthur Morgan and instituted in 1921; since

then every student has alternated between terms of study on campus and terms of

work at job sites away from campus.In the cooperative education program for students who graduated between

1946 and 1955, the calendar was divided into six sections, with two Fall periods

that were each 8 weeks long, Winter and Spring terms that were each 12 weeks

long, and two Summer terms, each lasting 5 weeks. For each of their 5 years at

the College, students were expected to study a total of 20 weeks and work 26

weeks. Students received one credit for each week of work they completed suc-

cessfully (i.e., work rated as successful by their employers); they were required

to earn 90 co-op credits towards graduation over 5 years. The student bodywas divided into two divisions who used the campus in alternating periods; often

a pair of students would be placed in the same job on alternating terms in order

to meet the continuous needs of the employer. Students were encouraged to com-

plete at least 26 weeks of work with the same employer over the course of a year,

but they often worked fewer weeks with more employers (for example, if they

wanted to explore a wider range of experiences) or more weeks with one em-

ployer (for example, if they were interested in post-graduate employment in that

setting). Placements were arranged with the help of a co-op advisor to assess pre-vious work skills and life experiences, to develop work and life goals for the next

work term, to create a resume, and to apply and interview for jobs. When a stu-dent returned to campus, credit was based on a co-op report written by the stu-

dent, a conference with the co-op advisor and an employer evaluation of student

work performance.

2.3. Instruments

The two sources of information used for the analyses described here were the re-

spondents Co-op Files drawn from the Antioch College archive, and aWork HistoryQuestionnaire designed for this study.

The archived Co-op Files included a list of jobs completed under the Antioch co-op plan, co-op reports (students written reections about the job and their learning)for some or all jobs completed, and employer ratings for each job completed. Other

materials such as admissions essays and Life Aims papers written in the rst yearof college were also available.

436 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447The Work History Questionnaire was developed for this study to determine de-tailed post-graduate work histories of the respondents. We rst asked for demo-

graphic information that might be relevant to career patterns such as years of

marriages or long-term relationships, birth years of children, graduate degrees

earned, retirement status, and explanations of gaps in employment. Then for eachjob held between graduation and the study year (or retirement, if applicable), respon-

dents were asked to provide the job title, employer, approximate dates in the position,

a brief description of job responsibilities, and reasons why they took the job and why

they left it. The respondents dened for themselves what was a new job. The survey

directions instructed the respondents that if they took on enough dierent responsi-

bilities for the same employer so that it felt like a new job to them, that they should

ll out a new sheet for that job, and we considered that a new job. No reliability or

other psychometric analyses for this instrument have been completed at this time.

2.4. Procedure

Graduates were contacted in 1997 and asked to participate in a study to describe

the processes by which combined work and study have their eects on students, both

while they are in college and across their careers. Those who returned a consent

form were sent the Work History Questionnaire, and one reminder card was sent

to those who did not respond within three months. Two telephone interviews werecompleted for a subsample of 33 respondents; those data were used to develop case

studies for the present report.

A descriptive analysis of the co-op and career work histories and some relation-

ships between co-op and career were reported previously (Linn & Ferguson,

1999). For the present study, each work experience was classied as to its occupa-

tional category in order to determine if graduates chose jobs that fell into the same

(or dierent) occupational categories as the jobs they had taken as cooperative edu-

cation students.

2.5. Occupational category and job transition coding

Researchers have used various occupational category schemes, and we considered

several of them. Miller and Forms (1951) study of Ohio workers used six categoriesthat reected the prestige and skill level of jobs: professional, owners/managers, cler-

ical, skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers. Our hypothesis about the outcomes

of exploring particular work functions and contexts could not be addressed with thesegeneral categories. Hollands (1997) six work environment types were developedto correspond to personality types; we wanted to capture the specic tasks and

occupational arenas rather than personality-based dimensions.We chose the Standard

Occupational Classication (SOC) system (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1998) to code

all co-op and career jobs into occupational categories. The SOCwas chosen because it

is a widely used government classication system, it has a manageable set of 23

major categories, and the 23 categories adequately dierentiate work settings withinoccupational levels like professional or skilled. Because we were interested in

from military service or business closes), control over leaving (e.g., desire for change

or nished graduate school therefore graduate assistantship ended), family-related

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 437(e.g., to follow partner or wanted to care for children at home), disabled, retired,

and unclassiable. Sometimes the same reason was given for transition out of one

job and into another (e.g., desire for change) and sometimes respondents oered adierent reason for why they left one job and took another.

Two coders coded 10 respondents independently, and achieved inter-rater agree-

ments of 97% for job function, 79% for job context, 97% for transition into jobs, and

98% for transitions out of jobs. Coding duties for the remaining les were shared

between the coders.

3. Results

Results of descriptive analyses are presented in order to characterize the study

sample further and summarize the central tendencies of their co-op and career

job-taking.

3.1. College-age variables

More of the respondents were social science majors in college (31%) than anyother major, with about 18% of the sample in each of education and sciences/math

majors. Also represented were majors in business (11%), engineering (10%), human-

ities (7%), arts (4%), and liberal arts (1 respondent). The respondents held an average

of 8.4 co-op jobs during college (SD 2:1, range 415). On average, 5.8 of thesejobs were new, i.e., not jobs to which they returned for a second term (SD 1:6,range 29), 3.6 co-op jobs were in cities that were new to them (SD 1:5,range 19), and 6.2 were major-related co-op jobs (SD 2:3, range 011). Therewhether students chose jobs after college that t either the function or context

of co-op jobs, or both, we coded separately the function and context of each work

experience.

On the Work History Questionnaire we also asked respondents to oer in narra-tive form the reason why they took and left each career job, because occupationalchoices can be constrained by factors outside the control of the individual: corporate

downsizing, family pressures, social pressures to retire on time, etc. Perhaps re-

spondents chose (or did not choose) jobs after college in the same occupational cat-

egories as their co-op jobs when they controlled the job choice, but not when outside

factors were at play. The reasons oered for transitions into a job were reviewed andfell into six categories: career advancement, no control over choice (e.g., drafted or

only job available), control over choice for a lateral or downward move (e.g., desire

for change, or for less stress), family-related (e.g., job ts childrens school scheduleor to re-enter work force after taking time o to care for children), post-retirement

job choices, or unclassiable. Transitions out of a job were coded into eight catego-ries: career advancement, red from job, no control over leaving (e.g., dischargedwere no signicant gender dierences for any of these variables.

438 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 4304473.2. Post-graduate variables

About 32% of the sample had completed a Masters degree, and another 14% had

a Ph.D., J.D., or M.D. degree. National norms for the percentage of bachelors de-gree recipients from this era who completed a Masters or doctorate are 17.6% and1.6%, respectively (US Bureau of Census, 1980).

The mean number of post-graduate jobs held was 6.5 (SD 3:9, range 1-23).About 41% of the sample had been self-employed at some point during their careers.

There were no gender dierences in graduate degree completion, number of post-

graduate jobs, or the rate of self-employment.

Forty-one percent of the sample took time o from their careers to care for chil-

dren or other dependents, and all of these were women (29 of the 34 women took

time o; of the ve women who worked continuously outside the home, three hadno children, one had one child, and one had two). For women who took time o paid

work to care for dependents (or, as one respondent noted, she took time o from

caring for her children to do paid work), the average number of years spent in care-

giving was 12.6 years (SD 9:1), with a range of 344 years. While all of the femalerespondents had taken paid jobs outside the home since graduation from college,

most had taken the years between their rst childs birth and their last childs rstgrade school year to care for them at home.

Most of the sample (78%) had retired from their primary occupation at the time ofthe data collection. The distribution of retirement ages was bimodal, with one mode

at 60 years and one at 65 years; the mean retirement age was 62.8 years (SD 4.1),range 5172 years. For those respondents who considered themselves retired from

their primary occupation (N 57), 17 (30%) were engaged in some kind of paidwork (generally as consultants) at the time of the study.

3.3. Occupational categories of co-op and post-graduate jobs

Qualitative software (Nudist Vivo 1.2, 1999) was used to search for patterns of

job-taking in the database of occupational categories and transition codes for each

respondent. For each of the 23 SOC categories, a text search was used to nd all in-

stances when that SOC was coded for a co-op job and also a career job. All possible

combinations of function and context were identied. For example, if a respondent

took a co-op job whose function fell into the business SOC and subsequently took

a career job whose context was also business, that instance would be counted as a

function-to-context link.We rst counted the number of dierent occupational categories explored on co-

op (as function and context) and taken as post-graduate jobs (as function and con-

text). Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations among these four variables are

shown in Table 1.

We then focused on the rst job after graduation, because of the interest of edu-

cators and policy makers about transition from school into work. We counted how

many respondents took that rst job in an occupational category that had been ex-plored on co-op. A total of 63 of the 73 respondents (86%) chose a rst job from an

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 439explored occupations is when they are oered and accept a position with their co-op

employers after they graduate. We found that 25 of the 73 respondents (34%) were

hired during their career by an employer they had worked for on co-op.

Table 2 shows some the results of looking beyond the rst job, to 50 years of job-

taking. The number of respondents is shown who took a co-op job in each occupa-

tional category, either in terms of the function or context of their work. The SOCs

are listed in order of the frequency with which they were taken by respondents as aco-op job function. The third column shows how many respondents then took a job

after graduation in the same SOC category (function) as they had taken a co-op

job. Gender proportions are shown in the last column. A binomial test was used

to determine which of these proportions diered signicantly from a .50 propor-

tion (equal numbers of men and women). Three of the SOCs reached signicance:

women did most of the oce support jobs and all of the social service ones, but

no engineering co-op-to-career links were made by women.

3.4. Patterns of job-takingoccupation they had explored. Another indication that co-op graduates take jobs in

Table 1

Means, standard deviations, ranges, and intercorrelations for number of occupational categories explored

on co-op and career (N 73)Variable M SD Range COOPF COOPC CARF CARC

# Co-op functions

(COOPF)

3.6 1.4 17 .66 .15 .06

# Co-op contexts

(COOPC)

3.6 1.2 17 .03 .00

# Career functions

(CARF)

2.9 1.5 18 .70

# Career contexts

(CARC)

2.7 1.4 16

* p6 :01 (1-tailed).Following various authors suggestions to study individual patterns (Miller &Form, 1951; Vondracek & Kawasaki, 1995; Young & Borgen, 1990), we then ana-

lyzed, individually and by hand, each of 73 graduates patterns of co-op-careerjob-taking, looking now at the general sweep of the pattern across the college and

post-graduate years, but still focusing on whether post-graduate job functions and

contexts were explored on co-op or not. Four co-op-to-career patterns emerged.Each respondent was classied into one of the four patterns by two independent cod-

ers, and any disagreements were discussed to consensus.

Gender dierences are described following each pattern. We bring to life each

pattern by adding a case study of a respondent from that pattern, with information

drawn from archived materials (admissions essays, required rst year Life Aims

papers, co-op reports) as well as WHQ and interview data collected for this research

project. Each case study was reviewed by the respondent on whom it was based, and

Table

Numb

Occ n

co-op

r

Oc

Life

440 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447Education, Training, Library 26 42 22 .59

Sales and Related 22 23 5 .20

Community and Social Services 17 33 12 1.00b

Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports,

Media

15 22 11 .64

Personal Care and Service 15 4 4 .75

Production 14 29 2 .50

Business and Financial Operations 13 16 7 .14corre

rience

Cowome

and c

evide

Arch

Foo

Hea

Man

Com

Tran

Con

Buil

M

Inst

Farm

Hea

Lega

Mili

Prot

a B

stats.bb Pr2

ers of graduates who worked in occupational categoriesa (N 73)upational category taken. . . As co-op job As co-op

then career

Proportio

female of

then careeFunction Context Function

e and Administrative Support 44 3 14 .79b

, Physical, Social Science 34 30 21 .67ctions made until they reported that the case study portrayed their work expe-

s accurately.

-op-to-career pattern #1: worked in explored function and context (N 20; 11n, 9 men). These graduates either settled into or only took jobs in functions

ontexts explored on co-op. No gender dierences within this pattern were

nt in terms of jobs taken or reasons given for taking and leaving jobs.

For example, respondent Annie Schwartz came to Antioch College from New York City at

age 17 in 1946. On her admissions application she indicated that economics, business or ac-

counting were her main interests academically; her father had told her that if she didntknow what she wanted to study, these were practical elds that would allow her nancial

independence. She had worked before coming to college as a salesgirl in a department

store and as a copygirl at the New York Times. Annie rst used the co-op program to

explore clerical functions in dierent contexts: she clerked at a publishing company, re-

turned for a term to work in the credit department of the store where she had worked in

high school, and then was hired for a term in the accounting department of a Chicago rm.

itecture and Engineering 10 5 8 .00b

d Preparation and Serving 9 11 0 .00

lthcare Support 8 1 0 .00

agement 6 1 6 .17

puter and Math 6 1 0 .00

sportation and Material Moving 5 3 2 .00

struction and Extraction 5 10 0 .00

ding and Grounds Cleaning and

aintenance

3 0 0 .00

allation, Maintenance, Repair 2 1 0 .00

ing, Fishing, Forestry 1 2 0 .00

lthcare Practitioners and Technical 1 16 0 .00

l 1 1 0 .00

tary 1 2 0 .00

ective Service 1 0 0 .00

ureau of Labor Statistics (1998). Standard Occupational Classication. Available on-line at http://

ls.gov/soc/soc_home.htm.

oportion signicantly dierent than .50.

Co text(N mednew functions but they were working in contexts they had explored on co-op. When

For example, respondent Stean Jorgenson came to Antioch in 1948 from Minnesota as a

Co-op-to-career pattern #3: worked in an explored function, new context (N 6; 3

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 441was to run a home as a wife, mother and community member. Her rst few co-op jobs ex-

plored the contexts of a city museum and the Colleges own music library, where she workedin receptionist/clerical functions. She declared Biology as a major and chose for her next

co-op employers a hospital in Chicago, a pharmaceutical rm in the Northeast, and an

on-campus research foundation focused on plant physiology. By her last year of college,

professional work and marriage had shifted somewhat in her priorities. In a co-op report

she wrote, Work means enough now so that it will carry weight in any matrimonial

decision. She found herself studying professional women at the College, to identify paths,

like scientic writing, that might allow both work and marriage. At each of these science

laboratory jobs, she warmed gradually to the work and struggled to keep the bigger picturewomen, 3 men). These graduates settled into functions explored on co-op but in new

contexts. No clear gender dierences emerged.

Mary LaMonde came to Antioch in 1943 from a small New England town. She was rst in

her class in high school, interested in science and mathematics but also English and philos-

ophy. Her true vocation, stated in a Life Aims paper required in her rst year of college,third year transfer student, 20 years old. He had attended a junior college and a university

branch campus, each for one year, while working as laborer in a paper company near his

hometown. His goal at admission was for a career in industry, and he was a chemistry ma-

jor. Steans rst co-op job, as a lab assistant at a large research institute, led him to realizethat he did not share the intellectual curiosity that he saw in the chemists in the institute set-

ting. Still uncertain about a career direction, he tried a co-op job with a government soil con-

servation service in another city, but was no happier there. He then moved for his next work

term to a putty manufacturing company in a third city, and found the production and

development work much to his liking. In fact, he returned to this job three more times. Stef-

fans growing excitement about the development of new products is evident in each of his co-op reports; he shifted from using the pronoun they to describe the work, to using the

pronoun we. The putty manufacturing rm wanted to hire him at graduation, but he

was drafted and spent two years doing radar repair in the Marine Corps. Once discharged,

he returned to Minnesota and the paper company he had worked at before Antioch, but this

time for work he described as mechanical engineering. Over the next 40 years, Stean moved

up to become a plant manager, then a vice president and general manager until his retire-

ment at age 63. His career was in a production context explored on co-op, but the manage-

ment functions he performed were beyond any functions he tried in college.womens and mens job-taking were studied separately, the management SOC wasthe unexplored career function for 15 men and only 4 women.She found the accounting work both boring and dicult. She was developing what she

called a Zionist political philosophy and began to imagine a move to Israel after col-

legeshe decided to try education because teachers were needed there. She explored teach-

ing in various educational contexts: day nursery, library, settlement house, and a school.

Annie majored in education and after graduating in 1952 she earned a Masters degree in

that same eld. She taught in a public school in the Northeast US for 7 years, took 10 years

o when her children were young, and returned to teach at that same school for 28 years

before retiring at age 67. In Annies case, her career as a teacher in a school reected botha function and context she had tested as a co-op student.

-op-to-career pattern #2: worked in new function, but an explored con25; 7 women, 18 men). These graduates landed in careers where they perfor

Co hesegradu e ex-

plore Two

442 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447itan newspaper. He was then drafted and spent a year-and-a-half in the infantry, always

traveling with his portable typewriter. He saw brief combat in Europe, and, while with

the occupational forces in Japan, started a battalion newspaper. A second newspaper job,

this time as a reporter for a small town paper, awaited him when he returned to college after

being discharged. He then combined his love of writing with his love of the theater and

worked as publicity director for Antiochs Shakespeare productions for three work terms.Harolds interest in politics won out over journalism and theater. He majored in govern-ment, worked in 1948 as an election examiner for the National Labor Relations Board in

the South, and graduated as a government major. He was married during his senior year,

and after graduation Harold returned to the small town newspaper where he had worked

as a co-op, only to be red just 6 months later, ostensibly for his liberal views on racial in-

tegration. He then moved to DC, where he became interested in politics while working as a

letter writer for politicians, and went to law school as a step toward a political career. Har-

old never ran for public oce, but worked for 20 years as counsel to a US Senate committee.

After leaving that job, he worked in private law practice, trying to help small solar energy

rms to go public, until he retired at age 66. Because he had never explored the function

or context of law, his career was categorized as falling in both an unexplored functionsubpatterns that were gender-related emerged, based on the reasons given for taking

these unexplored jobs.Subpattern A. Explored various functions and contexts on co-op but settled into

unexplored careers; reasons given were having little control over choice, moved to

follow a partner or other family-related choices. N 7 (7 women).Subpattern B. Minimal exploration of functions and contexts; moved into unex-

plored career for reasons of career advancement or because they wanted a change.

N 10 (3 woman, 7 men).For example, Harold Mays came to Antioch from Pennsylvania in 1942 with hopes of be-

coming a journalist. He had excelled in high school, and worked part time delivering mail

and newspapers, but spent most of his time writing for his high school newspaper and acting

in school plays. Harolds rst co-op job was as a copy boy at a large Midwest metropol-of scientic discovery and practical value in mind while absorbed with the daily tasks of

washing glassware, injecting mice, and growing corn. Mary married before graduation,

and her rst job after college was as an engineering assistant in a large corporation where

her husband was an engineer. She left after four years, and didnt do paid work outsidethe home for 20 years while she raised two children, except for brief stints as a census or

inventory worker. To help put her daughter through college, she worked as a substitute rural

mail carrier in her community, and then when her husband was disabled she worked full

time delivering mail until she could retire with a pension and benets at age 62. Raising a

physicist daughter was an important accomplishment. She continued an avid interest in bi-

ology throughout these years, volunteering with the Audubon Society and other science-re-

lated organizations, even taking geology courses at a local college with an eye toward

working in that eld. However, her husbands illness worsened, and he required around-the-clock care for over 10 years, until he died. Her work as a rural letter carrier was catego-

rized as the same functional occupational categoryadministrative supportas were her

rst co-op jobs, but she had never worked in that area as a context, and mail delivery is cat-

egorized there. Therefore, the bulk of her work outside the home was in a function explored

on co-op, but an unexplored context.

-op-to-career pattern #4: worked in new function, new context (N 17). Tates might have tried post-graduate jobs whose function and context wer

d on co-op, but their careers were mainly in new functions and contexts.and unexplored context.

the engineering program at Michigan State, one which follows the vocational co-

op model focused on career training, would show a higher rate of post-graduate hir-

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 443ing by a co-op employer than a liberal arts, environmental co-op program.

Despite the fact that only about a third of the sample was hired by a co-op em-

ployer after graduating, 86% took their rst job after college in an occupational cat-

egory that had been explored either in terms of functional skills performed or the

work context. This nding further supports the second hypothesis: most graduates

took jobs they had explored. These respondents were using the co-op program to test

various occupations, and generally settled on one that suited their skills, needs andMiscellaneous patterns: these graduates did not t into any of the co-op-to-careerpatterns described above (N 5; 4 women, 1 man). Three (2 women, 1 man) haddual careers, either two part-time careers held simultaneously or their post-graduate

work split into two consecutive phases. The two parts of the careers of each of these

three would have fallen into dierent co-op-to-career patterns as described above.Two women did not work outside the home after their mid-twenties, therefore there

was not enough work outside the home to classify into a pattern.

4. Discussion

This study relied on archived data about college-age cooperative education work

placements and a survey of post-graduate work histories to test hypotheses about ca-reer exploration and subsequent job-taking across 50 years or more for a sample of

graduates from one liberal arts college. The resultant data were analyzed by rst

classifying each job by occupational category. We then identied instances of explor-

ing an occupational function or context as a co-op job, and then taking a post-grad-

uate job in that same category. Five hypotheses were tested.

The rst hypothesis, that most SOCs would be explored on co-op, was supported.

Every one of the 23 SOC categories was represented at least once among the co-op

jobs taken by our sample of 73 Antioch graduates from the late 1940s and early1950s (see Table 2). This breadth of career exploration reects the liberal arts, envi-

ronmental nature of the undergraduate co-op program studied. The top three cate-

gories for both the function and context of co-op jobs in this era were oce work,

scientic work, and work in education. The jobs taken reect both student interest

in the types of occupations they wanted to explore as potential careers, and the kinds

of work made available by employers to undergraduates for 5-, 8- or 12-week place-

ments in this era.

The second hypothesis was that most graduates would take work in the same oc-cupational categories explored on co-op; it was supported in several ways. The fre-

quency of respondents who were hired after graduation by a co-op employer

(N 25, 34%) provides partial support for the second hypothesis. This rate is com-parable to the 33% found by Gardner and Motschenbacher (1997) in their study of

Michigan State engineering co-op graduates from a dierent era. This comparable

rate is surprising, because one would predict that a pre-professional program likepreferences. The opportunity to try on dierent occupations and to nd one that

444 P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447suits (positive career planning) is a commonly described goal of cooperative educa-tion undergraduate programs. Clearly for this sample of graduates from one era

and one college program, the goal of positive career planning was met.

Looking beyond the rst post-graduation job, Table 2 shows how many of the co-

op jobs taken in each occupational category were followed by post-graduate work inthe same category. Occupational categories varied in the frequency with which ex-

ploration on co-op was followed by post-graduate work. For example, there were

few instances of working at a management function as a co-op student (N 6),but students who did work at that level were highly likely to function as managers

during their post-graduate career (N 6 or 100%). Architecture/engineering(80%), education (85%), and arts/media (73%) co-op jobs were also highly predictive

of continuing that work post-graduation. Note that many of the jobs that were ex-

plored on co-op but were not taken after graduation were blue-collar jobs: food prep-aration, healthcare support, building and grounds, maintenance. It may be that the

diculty of such work and/or low pay convinced the respondents that they did notwant to take such jobs after graduation. Such negative career planning is an often-cited educational outcome of cooperative education programs.

We had predicted individuality in the patterns of job-taking (Hypothesis 3). Indeed,

no two lists of co-op and career jobs were the same among the 73 respondents. Simple

counts of how many dierent occupations were taken in college resulted in near zero

correlations with a similar count of dierent career occupations attempted (Table 1).A general tendency for the sample to explore occupations across this time span, or

to not explore, would have yielded a signicant positive correlation. If exploringwidely

while in college predicted a rapid settling down into a single occupation, a signicant

negative correlationwould have resulted. The lack of signicant correlations is not sur-

prising because highly individualized paths would be predicted by Vondraceks devel-opmental-contextual model (Vondracek & Kawasaki, 1995). While the environment

constrained student choices to the list of co-op employers sanctioned by the college

program and their advisors recommendations about student-job t, within that listof employers the students made choices based on their thoughts and feelings about

work placements that might suit them. Blusteins (1997) discussion of personal growthand self-denition goals of career explanationwould also suggest individualized paths.

Despite these individual dierences, most of the 73 respondents (N 68) fell intoone of four co-op-to-career patterns that reected the extent to which the function or

context of their post-graduate work had been explored during a co-op work place-

ment. However, the 73 respondents did not fall equally into the four patterns. Both

co-op-to-career patterns #1 and #2 describe post-graduate job-taking in occupa-tional contexts explored on co-op; 45 of the 73 respondents (62%) fall into just these

two patterns, supporting Hypothesis 4. These patterns support the idea that job con-texts are much more likely than job function to be the aspect of work that is carriedfrom co-op to career for this sample. One explanation for this nding may be thatbecause many college students have limited job skills, the functional work performed

is likely to change to more highly skilled functions once one graduates and works full

time for an extended period. One implication for research on career exploration is toconsider separating work function from context, especially for studies of adolescents.

P.L. Linn et al. / Journal of Vocational Behavior 65 (2004) 430447 445There are also implications of the centrality of context for educators who work

with students in co-op programs or vocational counselors promoting career explora-

tion. While on the job, career explorers should be encouraged to lift their heads up

frequently from the task at hand to observe, question, and consider the broader con-

text of the workplace in which they nd themselves. When they credit their work ex-perience in conferences with an advisor or on-campus seminars, students should be

encouraged to reect broadly on their learning: It is not just the work one does that

is important, but the occupational context in which that work occurs that is being

explored. The kind of exploratory attitude that Blustein (1997) promoted might

include such considerations of work contexts.

We were surprised at how few of the frequencies reported in Tables 1 and 2

showed the predicted (Hypothesis 5) signicant gender eects. In the era following

World War II, many women were encouraged either out of the workforce entirelyor into a limited number of elds like education or nursing (Rupp & Taylor,

1987). We expected that either parents or College faculty in this era might have dis-

couraged young women from taking co-op jobs far from home, yet we found that

women took as many co-op jobs in cities new to them as did men. We also expected

to nd more imbalanced gender proportions for various occupational categories in

the co-op-to-career links (Table 2). These ndings may reect the fact that Antioch

faculty and students tended to hold more liberal social views than did many faculty

and students in the study era. For the sub-sample who were interviewed (33 of the73), almost every respondent reported that Antioch faculty in the 1940s and 1950s

went out of their way to convince young women and men that any career was accept-

able for them, and these data support that egalitarian view.

While the hypothesized gender dierences were not supported when simple fre-

quencies and means were compared, the analysis of individual patterns of job-taking

did reveal gender dierences. For example, a move to a management function in

co-op-to-career pattern #2 was more typical of men than women. Also, the two

subpatterns of co-op-to-career pattern #4 are gender-divided: women moved intounexplored functions and contexts based on their husbands plans while men chosethis pattern because they were seeking a change or for career advancement. Finally,

women comprise most of the Miscellaneous pattern (4 women, 1 man), again for

family reasons: they worked part-time outside the home while raising children or

worked briey before leaving paid employment altogether. While Antioch faculty

and students in this era reportedly held liberal views about women working outside

the home and the kinds of work of which women were capable, the predominate

social gender roles of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s are still evident in terms of whichpartner led and which followed when geographical moves were made for career

reasons or when childcare was a priority for the family.

4.1. Study limitations

The most fundamental limitation of this study is the lack of a control group. We

cannot claim that participation in the cooperative education program resultedin particular eects. Because participation in co-op is mandatory for all Antioch

analyses like correlations that require all respondents to follow the same pattern ofvariable interrelationships may mask individual dierence patterns.

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Career exploration via cooperative education and lifespan occupational choice1This study was supported by research awards from the Pierson Lovelace Foundation, Cooperative Education and Internship Association, Midwest Cooperative Education and InternsIntroductionMethodsSampleSetting and programInstrumentsProcedureOccupational category and job transition coding

ResultsCollege-age variablesPost-graduate variablesOccupational categories of co-op and post-graduate jobsPatterns of job-taking

DiscussionStudy limitations

References